Death of Google Finance, and thoughts on discarding businesses

Several months back Google turned-off the old Google Finance page and introduced the new Google Finance.

I was sad to see the old Google Finance go as I found it to be a clean, well-thought-out presentation of stock information, charts, and portfolio information.  As a user, I could tell a lot love and care went into the site's design, and it seemed to be designed by someone with keen appreciation of what investors and other users would find useful.  It was by far my favorite site to check when looking at stock quotes, and looking at charts.  But that site is gone now.

Unfortunately, I found the new Google Finance to be entirely useless, and I'm now back to Yahoo! Finance.  I'm certain I'd still be using Google Finance if Google hadn't done the redesign.  I'm not the only one surprised at how bad the redesign was.  If you search "what happened to google finance" or similar you'll find a litany of links from a few months back describing passionate but confounded users who are dismayed at how bad the new site is and who were trying to find a replacement.

As an investor it's confusing to see a company discard it's users the way google sometimes does.  (This is not the only time google has done this.  See this thread related to other popular services that have been killed off like google reader.)

Rather than find a solution that preserves users, google sometimes pulls the plug and sends users to the competition.  It's like google has such great businesses in search, advertising, and youtube that smaller portions of the business are expendable, and efforts to make them successful are abandoned.  Or perhaps they're just too much trouble to maintain.  I don't know.  And to the contrary, it's entirely possible that the creative destruction of killing off these businesses is good for business in that it frees up resources for other projects.

I suspect, however, that as growth in these areas becomes harder to find, google is going to regret sending eyeballs and attention to the competition.  They're not at that point yet, but I wonder if that time is approaching.  The large tech players are increasingly encroaching on each other's space.

With Google Finance, though, the thing is, I've watched so many "google talks" with great investors (for example, here's Howard Marks talking about investing ) and there are clearly many employees with a high level of interest in investing.  It seems having Google Finance be the "go-to" investing site would be a natural progression for the business.  Google Finance really seemed core to my use of Google, and to a degree represented what Google was to me as a company.  But it's just not anymore.

This is just a hypothesis, and I could be entirely wrong, but as an investor, one observation is that perhaps there's a disconnect between good ideas and successful commercialization of those ideas at google.  Popular services are allowed to die on the vine.  Something just "seems" wrong about that.  Additionally, it makes me question value of efforts such as self-driving cars - wondering if those efforts are being pursued without commercialization as part of the plan.  Will google come up with great technological innovation in that area, but not have a plan or process to follow-through to commercialization?  These innovation-focused businesses without a focus on commercial end-use make me recall the stories of innovation at Xerox PARC that weren't translated into commercial success, but ultimately became success for other companies.  I don't know if that's the case at google, but it seems maybe the willingness to just let something good die like Google Finance might be a sign that perhaps Google sometimes doesn't have focus on the end user when redesigning services.  The redesign feels it was done for reasons other than the end user.  And there is no doubt that Google Finance had its share of passionate users and advocates.

I could be totally wrong on this.  Google has great businesses.  But it certainly feels odd when something like the demise of a popular service like Google Finance happens inside such a strong company.

Hard Problems

Long time since posting.

Sometimes we get caught up in a binary decision making process on controversial issues.  When a controversial, seemingly intractable problem arises, often two options for response are presented:

- Do something major.  There's a huge problem that requires a major change for a solution.  I'm concerned that the problem is large.  I think benefits of change far outweigh the negatives.
- Do nothing.  Even if there is a problem, there's nothing that can be done about it.  I'm concerned that the solution is worse than the problem.  Change is a slippery slope.

It doesn't help that when these type issues arise we often reflexively defend our pre-existing beliefs without thinking fully about the proper response.  For most of us, it's likely important to ask ourselves "Am I trying to prove myself right, or am I trying to get at the underlying truth?"  This is important to do, as it's natural to interpret information in ways that leaves our preconceived notions unchallenged.

Charlie Munger notes it's insightful that we should invert a hard problem to better understand it, so instead maybe before becoming entrenched  we should try a couple thought experiments.

Advocates for change might ask:  "What negative outcomes might we create in our efforts to address this problem?"  In this line of questioning, we might anticipate negative unintended consequences and might find that the cure is worse than the disease and proceed more cautiously.  The goal here is to make sure we don't advocate for change that ultimately creates another larger problem down the road.  In this context it's likely we'll better understand the opposing viewpoint.

or

Opponents to change might ask:  "Instead of trying to improve the problem, is there anything we can do to make this problem worse?"   In this line of thought, even though we oppose any change, we might see that there are in fact levers we might pull to influence the range of outcomes.  To say that "nothing can be done" might be inaccurate.  We might find that we're simply unwilling to consider those options.  But if we are unable to think of ways to make a problem worse, then a problem may truly be beyond our ability to influence.

And finally both opponents and advocates should recognize that doing nothing is also a decision.  Doing nothing is the same as saying the current status quo is the best solution we can arrive at.

There's a human tendency to make the accurate statement "We'll never completely solve this problem."  But we should recognize that statement as a completely different conclusion than saying:  "We can't improve this problem."