Hank Nussbacher wrote:
Google Groups is the most poor managed project in Google. No one really cares much about it inside Google (my view as an external user). Go try to find some of the older Usenet postings they imported years ago after they bought out Dejanews. You won't find much. I've reported bugs (search function, language search, etc.) over the past 3 years to them via their Groups forums and other means and basically they all end up in dev/null.
This is true for many of Google's projects. I believe it's an artifact of their "20%" policy. People are given work assignments on projects that Google wants improvements on, and then in 20% of their time they can work on projects of their own choosing. I believe that many (most?) of Google's abandoned projects were 20% projects, and their supporters did the first 90%[1] then got bored (lazy) and moved on to something new(er) and more exciting. I'm pretty sure Orkut and Google Groups were both 20% projects that have since been essentially abandoned. And don't get me started on Android. The mapping and navigation software on Android sucks so many different ways that I'm surprised that Google allowed it out into the real world, nevermind providing it on shipping products. It's been this broken for over a year, so obviously there isn't anyone inside Google who cares to fix the obvious problems. Whoever it was that developed these aps to this 90% state, has moved on to some new(er) and more exciting 20% project. jc [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule