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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 actually used Sets on a fairly regular basis. Check out it out before it's gone!
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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*
I also was able to meet with some (middle management) people at Google and their attitude reminded me very strongly of MS's behavior 15 years ago: They don't listen to what others say and what they say often implies: "We're the smartest people on the planet, the world revolves around us, if you don't want to work with us and use our stuff, you're just an idiot." So it think I can conclude that Google sees themselves as "winning" the way that MS saw themselves winning in the late 90's.
You can see the same change with all the "privacy is not important" and the recent Google+ product. I think we are really seeing a turning point here. Google has finally passed the point where it has, after a long time, accepted it's not the small geeky company it once was and is now just driving for profits. The scary thing is, they have got in a great position to exploit that now.
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
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.
Well, they are a pubically traded company that needs to grow every quarter in compressed 8 to 12 week time frames to boast its share price. Like most companies the need to cut costs and increase productivity.
The employees need to work 20% harder the same price and you can do this by having them focus on products which generate income. It is a business and not a fun place to experiment with cool toys.
The worst situation would be for the Wall Street investors to march in and hire efficiency experts who will then demand to force layoffs, hiring freezes, and benefit cuts, etc. This will foce the top talent to leave and kill morale and productivity. Look at what happened with HP and IBM? Need I say more? No one who is bright would ever consider working there now. Google is in trouble. Apple is suing them to death and its ad revenue is not generating that constant income increase every 8 to 12 weeks to boast their share price.
They need R&D of course, but they need to keep expanding and the best thing to do is increase productivity to keep its stock price highest.
http://saveie6.com/
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....
No time for innovation. All resources must be used to better clone Facebook.
I can almost hear Don McLean in the background - very, very faintly...
And they were singin',
I, I'm feeling lucky today
I boot my Chrometop to the desktop but the Wave's gone away
And Google boys turn off their Goggles and say
This'll be the day I get laid
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Oh, just call them DoubleClick and be done with it. That's what they are.
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