Made by Google

When reading David’s blog I read something I was feeling for a long time. That’s why I wanted to share it here as well.

It will be a rant, so bear with me on it. I’m sure some of you have heard about Killed by Google. – It is a long list of projects which Google/Alfabet has killed in the past. It has only ~290 projects in it.

Some of them weren’t successful which is normal, not every project can become the next Chrome/Youtube/Android, but that doesn’t mean you need to kill it like that. – giving people a few months only to change from the dead service.

Services like Google Domains, Inbox by Gmail, Google Nexus, and Google Reader had a lot of users, and people loved them. Making money from the projects is important, but these projects and much more could have been continued and made profitable. The process would have been slower, but Google kept Google + for 8 years. They have money to burn …

Now when using Google’s services I’m not sure if the app/project I am using isn’t going to die in a few mounts out of the blue. – does it ring a bell?

Changing from one website to the next can be easy and isn’t going to be a problem right? What happens when they stop working on the hardware solutions or stop their servers? – the change isn’t as simple as that, often it would take hours/days of work to migrate everything as it should. – if it is possible

As someone who uses Google’s services every day, I can’t be sure what features/services can be killed because X or Z thinks they can make more money with ads. That is why I’m starting to think of alternatives where I can. I hate maintaining services/servers when I don’t need to, but I will self-host some of my apps in the future. It will be a pain in the ass, but the “money well” may have dried for Google. With all their plans of AI bullshit, they can kill other useful apps for experiments that will die in a few years’ time.

P.S. I wasn’t a user of Google Domains.