David Pierce, writing for The Verge:

Google Podcasts is dead. It has been dying for months, since Google announced last fall that it was killing its dedicated podcast app in order to focus all its podcasting efforts on YouTube Music. This is a bad idea and a big downgrade, and I’d be more mad if only I were more surprised.

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.

This is easily the best description of Google’s ridiculous sunsetting of products: advertise it to infinity as being the next best thing, completely neglect to update it, then axe it years later or build some of its functionality into an existing, more popular product — that’s the Google way. Google Podcasts’ funeral on Tuesday reminded me of my favorite killed Google product: Inbox by Gmail. When it first came out, it was a new, futuristic, mobile-first client for Gmail, not meant to replace it, but to supplement it — and it was fantastic. In the early months, it required an invite from another Gmail user, just like Gmail first did in 2004, building anticipation and excitement for a novel email client that was designed for smartphones first.

Google marketed Inbox to the fullest extent possible, and it had every reason to do so. Inbox pulled information from your Gmail inbox, then surfaced that information as if you searched for it on Google – in other words, organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful, Google’s mission statement. But, slowly, either due to the lack of adoption or just budget cuts from within the company, Google began haphazardly adding Inbox’s features to the normal Gmail applications, showing small thumbnails for tickets or events in the email list. This by all intents and purposes wasn’t Inbox, but it looked like Inbox, even though it didn’t even come close to replacing it. People began using those features, naturally.

Then, Google said Inbox had run its course and it was time for it to go, redirecting people back to Gmail. Google just wasted five years of everyone’s lives by making them switch to a new email client when it could have simply added the new features to Gmail from the very beginning. This is not just one case — time and time again, Google has continuously wasted customers’ time by announcing and marketing products that will eventually meet the fate of death in the end. And these products are often unceremoniously discontinued, just like in the case of Google Domains, which for years was a competitor to Squarespace that offered lower prices, but in the end, was sold to the very company it aimed to eclipse. This behavior weakens consumer trust.

After just a few of these incidents — Google abandoning or neglecting a product enjoyed by so many — customers no longer trust Google. Case in point, when users on the social media website X circulated a false message “from Google” saying that Google was sunsetting Gmail, and users actually believed it so much that Google had to issue a clarification that Gmail was indeed not going away. Google suffers from such terrible mismanagement that users are no longer incentivized to rely on Google services, and that is a terrible thing for the market and for Google, whose services are relied on by hundreds of millions of people a day.

I don’t think Google will ever discontinue its core products, like Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and Android, purely because regulators would probably intervene in those decisions because of how much of an astronomical impact they would have on the economy and society. But Google will continue to disappoint unsuspecting users and funnel them into more lucrative services to extract advertising revenue from them. That is why Google discontinued Podcasts, Inbox, and so many more of its services — it didn’t want to spend money on development and wanted more advertising revenue. Think about it this way: If users are scattered across three different services, selling advertisements on each one becomes (a) more difficult due to the lack of users on each service and (b) less lucrative because those placements will be viewed by fewer people each. Concentration is in Google’s interests.

For now, nobody should place their trust in a new Google product due to Google’s lack of corporate management. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, has continuously proven himself to be a servile, incompetent leader, and the only reason Google’s market capitalization has grown over the past nine years is due to the market’s expansion — more people are buying smartphones and computers, and more people now need Google services. Pichai has not done a single good thing for Google post-Chrome, a project he helped lead. Silicon Valley start-ups like OpenAI and Anthropic are running laps around Gemini in the artificial intelligence chatbot department — Google’s entry was rushed out of the door to compete with Microsoft, for heaven’s sake — Google Search is overridden with robot-written spam, and Google has no answer to Apple and Meta’s virtual reality products.

Google, by every measurement, is losing its dominance in the technology sector because it has a lack of corporate conviction. The job of a chief executive at such a large corporation as Google isn’t to write code in the break rooms — it’s to inspire the company to do good things, and Pichai has spectacularly failed in this regard. Pichai’s Google is slow to innovate, makes mediocre products, and needs a morale boost. Whoever is able to do that should probably take the top post within the company as soon as possible.