Comment Re:They failed because... (Score 1) 218
Yes, Facebook makes mistakes with features. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?
Yes, Apple makes mistakes with hardware and software features. Sometimes they burn a developer by not approving an app. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?
Having worked at places that make software, I bring you the bad news it's normal for most software projects to fail.
Wow - you worked at a place that makes software! Maybe you should do some kind of ask/tell thing?
I manage software R+D at a large company. Sure I've seen failed projects. But our clients don't see many of them. We do our pissing around behind closed doors, and when we launch something we support it. We're saddled with a number of legacy projects that we lose money on and our developers hate, but we don't burn them because that would burn our reputation. And when we pick software tools, we look at precisely this kind of thing - how can we know this vendor is committed to the product.
So some developers wasted their life on a failed project's API, you think that situation is new or only applicable to google?
No, it's applicable to a number of companies. Most of them are small, and nobody pays any attention to them when they launch something until it's proven successful. This makes their job a lot harder. They have a chicken/egg problem with everything they do, no matter how good their stuff is. Does Google want to be in that boat?
And, clearly, this new product dilemma is something that Microsoft is constantly fighting with, simply because of the space they're in. But they've learned to be careful with it. Google is not being careful with it. They benefit hugely from the reputation with developers, but that's really starting to sour.
And it's getting soured by stuff that shouldn't matter - they're letting their reputation be sunk by stuff that was never that compelling, and didn't have anywhere near the launch effort they should have got. If you let developers have time (which they do), they'll make all sorts of stuff. Sometimes it'll be diamonds. But sometimes it's coal, and you need to have enough control (and ego-management) to say "No, we're not releasing this outside."