I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self was good and they were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of Google's problems.
Stadia is a perfect example of Google's risk aversion. Microsoft invested billions on the XBox from the start, and spent over a billion dollars just to buy Minecraft, but Stadia didn't make an effort to secure even a single AAA exclusive. The same goes for YouTube exclusives. Netflix and Amazon spent hundreds of millions on flops like Marco Polo and Rings of Power. Meanwhile, the only notable series that came out of YouTube was Cobra Kai, and even that got sold off despite being a cult hit. In retrospect, this was the correct business decision as all streaming platforms seem to be hemorrhaging money, but you can't expect to win big with that attitude either.
My favorite anecdote about Microsoft's Xbox strategy is that the original Xbox was a net loss of about $4 billion, and they considered that to be a huge success because that's just how much money it takes to muscle your way into an industry like gaming.
The problem is that Google’s core business model is too profitable, that nothing else can ever compete for attention and resources.
But you’re right, they need to take the burn for awhile until escape velocity. I think they did with YouTube in general until the ads money hit.
They’re also more geeky and not that creative of a company, nor do they really get design, so some of their blind spots can hurt them from time to time, although that’s separate from their AI issues which yes they have bungled their lead do to fears of the feds.
Very common at large companies. When I was an IT industry analyst I remember talking to someone at IBM about some new business initiative and they basically said if it didn't have serious potential to grow to a billion dollar business at some point, it wasn't interesting.
At large companies, there are just so many costs associated with attention, management effort, and everything else even if an initiative is sort of run "as a startup."
These execs actively kill businesses because in their minds it is either moonshot or nothing.
Its strange because they look at something that makes $200 million an year and think I am better off making something that makes a $1 billion than $200 million. They now shut down the $200 million product, but never succeed building $1 billion product. Net result is after a while you are -$200 million.
Do this with a few products for a few years, you are now just a pie in the sky dream company with no real products and actively shutting down things that bring in money.
Microsoft learned the hard way that the platform doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the games to bring people to it. It’s why they’ve spent billions left and right to acquire studios and publishers.
Hardcore gamers are basically a niche market. Not a trivial one as with power users of other types but how is Apple doing without (other than casual) gamers?
I remember Stadia as being a late-to-the-party (OnLive and others beat them to launch by a decade) me-too offering that claimed that it would be way better than alternatives because of unique Google infrastructure advantages and resources... but didn't deliver on those claims. Hype instead of actual product abilities.
Then when the hype didn't win the market in the first year, they didn't have the stamina to keep going like Microsoft did with the Xbox.
This is key to my current perception of Google. I don't get invested in any new Google product for the same reason I don't get invested in any new Netflix show, it's a coin flip whether they will cancel it while I'm in the middle of it.
Search, Gmail, Android and Maps are the only things I regularly use, all of which I'd be happy to replace with another offering, some of which I'm already starting to replace.
That’s the point isn’t it? Google has trashed their image within tech circles so much that that a product like Stadia is DOA because its EOL is a self-fulfilling prophecy if everybody believes Google won’t commit.
MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode i.e. a Google text editor / IDE. It’s very telling that Google has never entered that market: the closest is Android studio which is just JetBrains.
Google actually did build an IDE that they use internally called Cider, but it's so tightly integrated with their weird monolithic VCS that it wouldn't make sense to release it publicly.
I haven't seriously used Windows in a long time and vaguely remember some rumblings between Vista <> 7 <> 8 but have Microsoft ever really had a trust issue with respect to supporting their software? That's kind of their whole thing isn't it?
There was certainly skepticism - but it wasn't only about being cancelled. Plenty of it was around questions like "will the latency be good enough?" and "what's with this buy-games-outright-then-also-pay-monthly pricing model?"
Maybe I'm moving only in "Google fan boy" circles, but so many of my friends said that Stadia will be a game changer, that I started to think I'm stupid to see what they see because "I'm just not a gamer".
Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what I'm missing.
> [Google] were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver [a product like Stadia]
Nvidia beat them to it with GeForce Now, even offered it for free (in a perfectly functional as far as I could tell 'beta') for ages, and it is still available.
The entire point of stadia was never to have a decent gaming experience. It was to get in bed with gaming companies so they could act as middlemen and milk streamers for playing games. Google was clear, they didn't think it was fair for streamers to play games created by big companies without sharing that profit back with the game creators. As soon as they realized no one was having that, stadia went fully lame.
This already happened with Google+ back in the day. There was a massive hype… then they didn’t deliver after launch.
Facebook wasn’t just as dominant back then and Google could have had perfect integration with Android - but they didn’t, in the end it was just another isolated Google project left by the wayside.
