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Google To Discontinue Google Labs
kai_hiwatari writes "Today, Google has announced that they are closing down Google Labs. They say this will help them prioritize their product effort. Google says closing Google Labs means ending many of their experiments. However, not every experiment will be gone. Google will be incorporating the Labs experiments they have decided to continue in other product areas. Android apps such as Google Goggles, Google Listen etc. will continue to be available in the Android Market."
I think this is the single most disappointing announcement Google has ever done.
I can almost hear Don McLean in the background - very, very faintly...
...I actually used Sets on a fairly regular basis. Check out it out before it's gone!
--
Isn't the whole point of the "20% time" over at Google that people can just work on whatever they want, useful or not? Labs seemed like a great place for this sort of work to live, whether it became a "real" product eventually or not. I'm not really sure I understand the logic behind closing it down to "focus" on their main products. If that's their goal, they should eliminate the 20% time completely.
On another note, does this mean all the labs in Gmail, etc are going away as well?
I use google sets from time to time when I can't remember something, like the name of a product or company, by generating a list from items I know are similar.
I've always *loved* Google Labs! It's where I first bumped into "suggest," and a whole bunch of other really cool features that have eventually been rolled into the final product.
I'm very, very sad. Used to be a Red Hat Labs that suffered the same fate; I guess that sort of paradigm just doesn't have enough energy for the long run.
*sigh*
We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed.
It's a lot faster just to read the orig.
Does this mean the end of Google's self-driving cars?
Oh please don't let them take this offline!
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
I doubt this is the end of Google generating cool ideas/apps. As long as they keep on hiring new guys with brilliant imagination, they are safe. But this announcement sounds like they are moving towards more big corporate style work flow, where all cool ideas are channeled towards an existing product. I see some similarities with Microsoft here, where most research is geared towards an existing product.
Potential downfall is, some ideas/apps/products are better off alone. For an example, whole Xbox Kinect was exceptional as a hardware device. But as it was bundled with the gaming console, we missed out all the other cool stuff it can do (hacks we saw on youtube). Quite lucky they released a SDK. Sometimes, I wish they released Kinect as an separate ubiquitous hardware.
I hope this is not the case, but it sounds like they are killing off their central idea birthing grounds? When Google first started developing an OS for cell phones it would have seemed like a crazy stretch for a search engine company, but Android is successful today. How many new "crazy" ideas will never see the light of day that could create future critical technologies for the company by this decision to "prioritize their product effort"? It is important for a tech company to have focus, but it needs at least a small group of innovative people to have the opportunity to let their ideas run wild in order to create the next big thing or they will eventually just stall and hand over technological innovation to a smaller, hungrier company. To me this seems almost as stupid as when Xerox decided that the core ideas at Xerox PARC in the 70's weren't worth productizing and basically gave them away to Apple.
Is funny or depressing...
An email came through and a coworker died last night. Everybody read it and then went about their day.
This announcement came on Slashdot and I just heard three people exclaim "Noooo!!!"
I am still undecided whether that is a sad state of affairs or funny....
On the surface this is just plain dumb. But lab extensions like Tasks should just be a default part of gmail anyway and hopefully will be. My guess is this is about superseding the labs concept with apps which can come from anywhere and are easy to monetize.
No time for innovation. All resources must be used to better clone Facebook.
I've always been wary of "cloud computing", esp. when it's powered by a hybrid "thick-client" connected to a remote data repository... Applications anyone? At least with a client side service (eg: mail reader app) I can continue to use the features I like (such as gestures, goggles, nibbles, etc.) beyond the external "support" lifetime -- Without wondering if a feature will disappear tomorrow.
As an avid Google Labs user, I find their lack of support disturbing.
Furthermore, my plotter does not work with Windows7. The MFG no-longer supports it, so they won't recompile the driver, or give out the source so that I may do so. XP's EOL is 993.0488278587964 from now. This tells me that not only will I be using G'Linux / FLOS Software in the near future, and insist on hardware driver source-code, but that "The Cloud" I use must be built from my own servers, or not at all.
I think I'll call my globally accessible private personal network "The Closet"; I suspect many will identify with this terminology in terms of privacy for multiple reasons.
I'm reading the final book of the Baroque Cycle right now. Who let you out of the book? You sound just like a Tory scrivener.
Of course, if you're so easily lead by the nose into the "fear and greed" school of business, of course your backers will be quick to exploit this. You've lashed yourself to the bilge pump. Happy treading.
In every business, there's a right balance between short term necessity and vision for the long haul. Many small businesses have been scuttled by hard nosed investors who inhaled too much (or too little) coinage fume while the world was changing around them, to paraphrase 3000 pages.
While many were left wondering, Google tells me that the company has no changes to announce with regards to the 20 Percent Time program; killing Labs doesn’t mean the discontinuation of the one day a week Googlers get to spend on “projects that aren’t necessarily in [their] job descriptions.” “We’ll continue to devote a subset of our time to newer and experiment projects,” Google representative Jason Friedenfelds tells me.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/20/20-percent/
insight through the mind
Google is far too willing to pull the plug on their ventures for me. I used to use the GOOG411 service, but they killed it. And I'm concerned that if I put a lot of time and energy into Google+, they'll kill it too.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Google Labs is going and, in other news tonight... Google Directory is already gone!
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-directory-no-longer-available.html
It really sad that Google feels it has to trim so many projects and services