I co-admin a large group that had to find a new home when it was killed off. We went to a third party (groups.io) that accepts money in exchange for services.
Will that have longevity? No idea, but it's at least preferable to trusting [insert big tech co]'s benevolence in keeping a service (that they seemingly don't care about) running.
Money is but one piece to ensure longevity. How many people even work at groups.io? What's their business continuity plans in case the founder or someone critical to the team dies, either due to old age or some sort of tragedy? Or becomes tired of running it?
I'm not convinced it's preferable - people get old and tired of running a thing, or undergo some big life event that changes their priorities, and it's so tiresome to find a successor. Groups.io doesn't have the kind of transparency for me to trust in its longevity. (I am in a group or two hosted there though.)
Meanwhile, large tech can keep something running well past the initial creator's interest as waned. Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Google 20 years after they founded it, but I doubt they've had the same passion for new algorithms to improve Internet search for far longer. Despite that, Google is going to be around for a long time. Can you say that about groups.io? I don't even know who the CEO is or where the company is based.
In the case of google groups, the important thing to realize is that Google is from an older era of the Internet, when people used mailing lists to keep in touch and wrote long form posts rather than pictures on Instagram. So dropping support for mailing lists simply would not work with the current company culture, and something deep ingrained into a company's culture is difficult to change, especially as new employess get steeped into that culture.
I'm not going to deny the idea that Google Groups it's been "left to die", but I'd expect to see a facelift and a upgrade to Google Groups long before it dies, simply because it's an important dogfood product.
Groups.io was founded by Mark Fletcher[0], who in '97 started the mailing list service that Yahoo! eventually bought and turned into their Groups product. They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1]. Nonetheless, they're small and one might guess there's a high bus factor here. (Sorry Mark!)
I think it's a toss up either way. I hadn't seen talk of Google Groups being internally significant until this thread, but they've burned enough similar products that it was barely a consideration for me.
> They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1].
This isn't quite the brag you think it is.
10 years in, a product like this should be mostly fleshed out. On the linked page, I'm seeing design as well as technical changes mentioned. Also, they apparently only started working on translations recently.
Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. Once you accept that, your perspective on 10 years may change. It's a long time. I challenge anyone to find discussions of this type from 100 years ago. Even if it was recorded (unlikely), did it survive after all of the participants died (unlikely)? Yes, we have 100 year old newspapers, but 100 year old discussions about underwater knitting.
Scientific journals were basically the mailing lists of their time, especially when they first started. You can easily find journals from 100s of years ago.
In theory, a good _independent_ product with an active user base and a profitable model has a better than average chance of surviving (bus factor aside).
Should the creator want to move on, someone should find the revenue stream attractive for some (even small) amount of money.
I’d bet on baseline profitability to keep something alive over an outsized dream of future growth or potential synergies almost every time.
I'm a normal enough person and so I can get good at most things. But, it'll take a few tries to get good at it. Riding a bike, swimming, SATs, etc. The first time I rode a bike was a disaster. I hurt myself and fell off. But I got back on and built up my bike balancing skills and, well, now I can ride a bike without falling off.
Soft skills, like managing people, are just like that. Another skillset to build, with practice, just like in an RPG. But one thing that I've never had to do before is find a successor to own my business. It's just not a muscle I've ever used. Nor, I bet, have many other people. So when Mark Fletcher, who seems like he's held this since before the Yahoo times, decides he's had enough and wants to retire, is he going to have a well practiced "find a successor" muscle? or is he going to fall off the bike, disastrously? Because the other thing about riding a bike is that you can read all the books, listen to all the podcasts about it, but that all pales in comparison to actually riding a bike and practicing.
You know who does have experience with replacing people like they're cogs in a machine though and nominating successor? Giant machines aka Google in this context.
So to each their own. I'm going to bet on dogfood keeping the dog alive until the owner decides it doesn't love the dog called Google Groups any more. I'm still very sad about Google Reader being put out to pasture and more recently Stadia, but lovable the German Shepard of a dog that is Search won't stop getting love from it's owner Alphabet and neither will Keep.
My problem is that the bus factor can't be put aside when it's such a small number, and that pile of "should"s add up to just as much, if not more, uncertainty, compared to Google letting groups living on in a half zombified state essentially forever. At the very least, you have to admit that once you put some thought into it, it's not as cut and dried as "boo hoo Google killed off Reader in 2011 and I'm still salty about it" (which, tbc, I am.)
>I co-admin a large group that had to find a new home when it was killed off. We went to a third party (groups.io) that accepts money in exchange for services.
Irony / wheel coming full circle, sort of:
Follow the links about M&A and founders in the links below.
Anyway, I knew about this history because I had a Yahoo! Groups account before it was that, i.e. was either eGroups or OneList, had been following Mark Fletcher, and had a groups.io account too, and had read his blog from long back.
I co-admin a large group that had to find a new home when it was killed off. We went to a third party (groups.io) that accepts money in exchange for services.
Will that have longevity? No idea, but it's at least preferable to trusting [insert big tech co]'s benevolence in keeping a service (that they seemingly don't care about) running.