This is a very astute observation, and one that I've seen in practice all too often. Thank you for this remarkable insight, I will definitely put it to use.
They don't care because they're not incentivized to care. It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
> It will remain like that until maintaining projects well is at least as good a path to a promotion as creating new projects.
But then there's equally a danger of becoming IBM, which would be worse. (In this case, if Google creates something that people need then pull it, then other open-source people can replicate it).
I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance. Even Yahoo did this.
> I think the sane middleground is for them to clearly identify what's experimental, what may be discontinued/deprecated/pulled, and to communicate those expectations and timeframes, in advance.
That might not work well for Google specifically, thinking about how long GMail was branded as "beta". Also, much of their consumer-facing things need network effects (think their piles of messengers)…
I think the people making this sort of decision ("Should we kill X minor feature of Y product?") are quite a long way down from the top, and probably were engineers themselves in the past. This isn't a "pointy haired boss" level decision. It's a trivial feature in a core product. It's much more likely it just needs someone to own it and no one wants to.
How long until people get it through their think skull? You are not the customer. Google's customers are corporations advertising and spying on you for the US government.
Stop using their services, stop giving them free data. Stop giving them access to your life to sell to the highest bidder.
There's no incentive for people to do that: things like maps, search, and gmail are fantastic products, and on the other side of the equation it doesn't negatively impact my life in the slightest to have google profiting from having access to private information about my life. That's the case for the vast majority of people; their private lives aren't interesting enough for there to be any reason to avoid selling them to tech companies in exchange for excellent products. So it's quite deliberate; it's not a stupid mistake that people are making due to lack of thought processes in their thick skulls. On the contrary, it's the population of people voicing your opinion that is making the mistake in their risk analysis: you are both wildly overestimating the probability that something genuinely bad will happen and also overestimating the extent to which your private life is interesting to anyone else.
That's pretty much how I've always seen it.
Though I suspect a very large % of Google product users don't even give it a second thought that if they're getting something for "free" they must be paying in some sort of hidden/indirect manner.
I'm actually a fan of targeting advertising too - when it's done well it can genuinely be a useful sort of information that can assist in deciding what products to buy. What I don't get is why it's so often not very smart (e.g. getting tonnes of ads for a product that I literally just bought and couldn't even have received yet given shipping times).
Actually, never mind that. They know. They just don’t care (for a variety of reasons).