Google refuses to invest in solid product strategy and UI/UX, and the results are becoming predictable
Few things in tech were more predictable than Stadia shutting down.
Here’s what I wrote the week it came out:
Here’s what I said about it in 2021.
And here’s my analysis of why this keeps happening: How I Knew Stadia Would Fail
The overall reason for this is UI/UX in my opinion, which I talked about here in 2020.
I’m not an expert on internal Google politics, but it seems to me—and I’ve heard elsewhere—that they pretty much let engineers run everything. The coding, obviously, but also a whole lot of the product side as well.
If that’s true, it’s not working. Again, maybe there are other factors that I’m not aware of, but to me this reads as not having a clear product vision and solid designers as part of product teams.
As I ranted about with Google’s management interfaces, the interfaces seem completely oblivious to how people will actually use the products. So they fail.
Over, and over, and over.
Here’s another instance of me complaining about this from 2019.
To be clear, Google’s strategic goals and large projects are overwhelmingly respectable (self-driving cars, fighting disease, etc.), and I continue to look up to them as leaders in technology for those types of efforts.But when it comes to their basic web services, their mobile platform, their UI/UX, their sense of design and integration, their attention to detail, and 1,000 other things about how they present themselves, they’re third-rate or worse.
I’ve been talking about this for nearly 10 years now. And so have thousands of others.
Billions?
At this point I’ve lost my empathy for them. How in the hell can you continue making the same exact mistake, for like 10 years, which is no-doubt causing the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in losses in dozens of products—but you don’t adjust?
How?
Whatever. I guess we just slowly wait for someone who knows how to make a GUI to catch up to them in backend competence. Because then they’ll be in serious trouble.