The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a process I’ve come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists, eventually launches a competitor out of some other part of the company, obviously begins to deprecate it and shift focus to the new competitor, and then, years later, finally shuts it down for real. The Google Graveyard is full of apps like Reader, Duo, Inbox, Allo, Wallet, and countless others that have been through The Google Cycle, and it feels just as bad every time.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists, eventually launches a competitor out of some other part of the company, obviously begins to deprecate it and shift focus to the new competitor, and then, years later, finally shuts it down for real.
Google could have owned that whole experience, helping turn a bunch of casual scrollers into listening obsessives — and maybe figured out how to monetize it for everyone.
But that would involve the kind of cross-platform, coordinated work that you can’t really expect from the company behind Google’s Many Competing Messaging Apps and Convoluted Reminders Systems.
There are plenty of creators out there who would happily work in a YouTube-like advertising revenue system for audio, but Google never bothered to build one.
It’s one thing to sunset a bad or unpopular app, but Google is killing a good and well-liked one because it’s easier to show you its existing ad inventory somewhere else.
Google has muddled its way through a dozen messaging apps; built several competing VR and AR platforms; killed a bunch of well-liked brands trying to make the smart home happen; and so many more.
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