Yet this clearly fits into Google's product vision where (for example) you could be shopping with your Google glass, see a product that is offered at a discount, but you can't fit the product into your small autonomous vehicle. You purchase the product and continue shopping, have a google now card pushed to you warning you that the product will be delivered to your house in 30 minutes, use your Nexus phone to turn on the A/C in your house as well as the outdoor lights and the room in which it will be delivered and have the back door unlock for the delivery person. Receive a confirmation of the product being delivered as well as a visual recap of the product being placed in your home as well as a request for adjusting your home's settings (relock the door, turn off the lights and A/C). It sounds like a pretty focused plan IMO.
Why is Google getting into this? I don't see the value in this. I agree they will get my day to day purchase data but is it worth going through the hassle of launching a physical delivery service? Its just not scalable as quickly. It consumes way too many resources and is a mess to handle the logistics and at the end of the day the margins cannot be high unless they are also selling the goods themselves. Will it be competing with Amazon soon?
If not unless my daily purchase data can offset that revenue somehow I don't see how they can sustain this for long.
Six months of free same-day delivery, but what's the value of my purchasing data to Google? Shouldn't testers be compensated for that, or does that fall under the altruistic "Google needs your help?" Am I to think of Google as just another buddy who needs a lift to the bus station?
There are two elements provided to Google here: service viability and the purchasing data from the testing period.
It's certainly open to debate, but I'm questioning that the delivery itself is compensation enough for everything that Google is receiving from the testers. Obviously Google (and you) thinks this, but I don't agree that there's only one possible value-based assessment of the relationship.
Whether or not free same-day delivery is fair compensation for your participation is a relevant topic.
But your characterization of it I found disingenuous: "Am I to think of Google as just another buddy who needs a lift to the bus station?"
There's no reason for the snark, and to pretend like Google is just trying to score a freebie like your hypothetical mooching friend is framing the argument disingenuously. The cost of delivering something same-day is non-trivial - Google is not expecting a freebie, though you are of course welcome to value your privacy above that dollar amount.
I don't think that it's unreasonable to say that Google gets the purchasing data for free in this deal, but these things are quantifiable, right? The value of the shipping and the value of the data? The data might be harder to arrive at a number, though, since purchasing data can be reused over and over for different metrics, increasing its value.
I'm not sure what, "you're not all that" means, but as mentioned elsewhere, Webvan and Kozmo provided the same product and, I'm guessing, value...for naught.
come to think about it, it's more like they're giving you a ride to the bus station, while you complain that they're spying on your travel arrangements. I know the purchasing and delivery patterns in the aggregate constitute valuable economic information, but free same-day delivery has a non-zero economic benefit as well.
Free market works - if there weren't enough people to try this out, Google would've certainly paid people to try this out. But I am sure there are a lot of folks who find this deal attractive.
Um, google, are you really targeting the right people with Target, Toys R US, Staples, and Office Depot? I was about to give it a try, but I don't think I've bought anything from any of those stores ever - nor do I really plan on it either...
if you've never bought anything from target, then you're definitely not in the set of "right people" for this program. it goes without saying that the key to success here is logistical optimization, and big-box stores are the easiest place to start.
While I agree it's off topic for this article, I think it's legitimate to assume a correlation.
The justification behind shutting down Reader was the low number of people using it when compared to other Google projects, and the need to direct resources to other, more strategically important ones. As Larry Page eloquently put it, more wood behind fewer arrows.
So if Reader was sacrificed to the overarching Google strategy, it's at least interesting, and perhaps relevant, to weigh its loss against new projects that spring up, like this one.
Judging from the Techcrunch leak at the start of the month(http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/04/google-is-building-a-same-d...) this product belongs to the new Advertising & Commerce unit which was formed when the Maps and Commerce unit was broken up this month. A product maintained by Google's dedicated monetization unit probably has a better chance of being somewhat stable.
Right...if this "wood putting" strategy involves putting more wood behind fewer arrows, why do the number of arrows seem to be increasing, while favorite old reliable arrows are getting the shaft?
I think people have come to see Google almost as a government for the Internet in that they expect them to invest in the infrastructure simply for the greater good.
I think the rule of thumb is that any old product which doesn't firmly belong to one of the 5 units (Search/Knowledge, Chrome/Android/Google Apps, Identity/Google+, Advertising/Commerce and Youtube/Video) created after Page's 2011 company reorg is at danger of being shuttered. As long as a product belongs somewhere it has a better chance of staying alive, and one way to measure that is when the last update to it was.
Except that a service like this has very little lockin. You might invest hours into setting up something like Google Reader the way you want. This is just a logistics service. If Google provides this service for only six months and disappears, the userbase doesn't lose anything except the service.
I think your argument is still valid for something like Keep. I just don't think it is relevant here.
Even if killed, it's not like if you order a roll of toilet paper, the loss of the service will somehow hurt you. The lock-in effect with e-commerce is far less.
I think you've made an incorrect assumption - OP did not make the "direct correlation" as you imply, nor do I see anyone else on HN doing this either. If you don't like people talking about Google Reader, fine - just don't comment on their comments. Or write a GM script to hide all comments with "Google reader" in them. Problem solved.
Your comment was fine and, in light of recent events, quite appropriate. If you hadn't said it, someone else would have. Why? Because it's clearly and obviously something on all of our minds right now.
