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Google To Shut Down 10 Products
Google announced yesterday that it is closing a number of its current products and merging others into similar services. Many of them will continue to be available in the near future to facilitate the transition. The list of affected services includes Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki, and Subscriber Links. Google's Alan Eustace wrote. "This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people. All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products. As for our users, we’ll communicate directly with them as we make these changes, giving sufficient time to make the transition and enabling them to take their data with them." The link contains brief descriptions of how each service is getting phased out.
The recent developments within Google and their moving to identity servi.. social networking with demands for ID scans if someone reports you for "fake" name, and other general evil stuff just shows Google has matured as a company and is now just like everyone else. It's not a recent development either, it has been going on for several years, but now everyone else is starting to notice it too. They cut down the amount of geeky stuff like work-on-your-own-projects, they go aggressively into markets and they use every evil marketing tactic in the book.
That is fine. Every company is like that. But slashdotters should stop giving them free passes because they're "google".
"It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact productsâ"the ones that might improve the bottom lines of division VPs and thousands of large portfolio google shareholders."
There. Fixed that for you.
Shutdown like this remind that it is never good to rely on one service or company. From all the services closed, I liked Google desktop quite a bit on my linux box a couple of years ago. It could slow down the machine too much at some points and it had also not been clear to me how much and I fell back to rely on good old unix tools or beagle.
These are 10 more prime examples of the "Software as a Service" concept failing us yet again.
It makes no sense for any individual or company to use such "services". It's just too damn risky. The only safe and sensible approach is to insist on real software that you can run on your own systems.
I have clients who still run software originally developed for DOS, back in the 1980s. Even if they don't have the source code, they can run it just fine on much newer hardware, and they don't have to worry about some other company going under or canceling the product and it then being unavailable to them.
While it's relatively frequent to see normal software being used for decades after it was initially written, it's extremely rare to see any sort of "Software as a Service" lasting even more than a couple of years.
3rd party solutions are nice stopgaps for those who can roll their own. It helps prove out the use case without the high investment in R&D and support.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Google Pack is the only way I know of to install Google Chrome on a computer for every user, instead of only in the local user space. With its discontinuation, this will cause even more problems for installing Chrome in a corporate environment. Anyone knows another method?
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Holy shit they're shutting down products I've never heard of and nobody uses. That's fuckin evil.
Too bad about fast flip, I found a number of interesting stories that I would never have seen otherwise.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Then who do you rely on? Who provides your cell phone service? Internet Service Provider? Electricity? I'm guessing there are a fair number of coporations listed in the answers to those questions. You will have to rely on corporations for any service that connects you to a larger community. Even if you go off the electrical grid as I have done in the past, you still need batteries, inverters, panels, back up generators, diesel fuel. You have to get those form someone.
Ouch, I used that service when it was still independent, although I mostly got "I'm too stupid to Google, can you answer this question for me?" kind of questions (for those who don't know Aardvark). So they let Google buy them, and then shut them? That must suck. Or don't the founders care, since they just cashed out?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
All i can say is it is good that i didnt rely on any of those services. This tells me not to rely on google for any services.
Well, I guess it's google who would tell you to fuck off them. They offer a number of services, some of them are here to stay, and other are experiments (not necessarily tech experiments, they can be business experiments, too) and if they don't go well, they go off the market - same as every other product.
Anyway, feel free to ask google for a full refund on whatever you spent on those services.
Pretty much all of those services haven't been updated in ages or aren't even used. For example I used to use Google Desktop, but uninstalled it about 2 years ago because it was buggy, performance hogging and slowed down my machine.
Damn right. Single vendor lockin is never a good idea if avoidable.
It IS avoidable. You can export all your Google stored stuff (pictures, emails, whatever). It's called Google take out.
http://www.dataliberation.org/
Of course most people are lazy and won't do it, then complain if something is lost.
Give me a break.
Google is a business. They are out to make money. The fact that they have to axe a few products that you probably aren't using (never mind paying for, since a few of those things were freebies) does not mean that they've decided to follow the path of evil. It just means that they have good business sense.
so you intend on writing all your own stuff then? Since all companies will ditch underperforming offerings, that means you cant use ANY product..
The lesson is to use paid services, and always have an exit strategy. or just suck it up and expect things to change.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It was, pretty much, a dead product after Windows 7 came out. Native searching in operating systems are much better now; it doesn't make any sense to have an auxiliary product that isn't as well integrated doing, essentially, the same thing.
As for the others on the chopping block; did they ever have that many users?
If you have a local app, you can run it pretty much forever. It might not get updated, and you might need to run it on old hardware/OS, but you will almost always have access to it.
In the cloud, things can appear, disappear and change.
If you depend on a program, or the specific behavior of a particular version, you lose.
It's the corporations, man! They're, like, out to screw the consumer! Boycott the corporations!
*I don't get the irony of wearing a Che Guevara shirt bought from the gap*
-Sent from my iPad, from inside a Starbucks.
One wonders what Google will kill next. Likely targets are products which lose money, don't provide opportunities for ad insertion, and don't collect monetizable information about users. Take a look at Google's list of products (which, amusingly, doesn't contain "G+"). Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Picnik (Google's photo editor), Google Voice, Google Talk, and SketchUp may be next.
Google Health has already been killed. Google has stopped digitizing old newspapers. Knol (Google's answer to Wikipedia) was never very successful. Those are likely targets, too.
Google is no longer worried about Microsoft, which has failed to compete successfully in online services. Google is worried about Facebook and Apple. So all those Google products which targeted Microsoft's business model, but lost money, can be dumped.
Exactly right. If you are going to launch a lot of experimental products you have to be willing to put em down almost as fast when they don't succeed lest you get so many going you can't keep launching new ones and get stuck maintaining a bunch of losers forever out of fear that the few people who did like them will scream loudly on Internet fora. For years everyone made jokes about the beta label Google put on everything, well now ya know.
Democrat delenda est
Yep, and see how far you get getting information out of most of the other cloud based services. I work with someone who had to break down and pay extra for POP access to his email account so he could get his data out. Google makes getting your information out easy. They seem to take the approach that you'll _want_ to use their services.
Too bad I still can't export my gTalk chat logs (no, it doesn't work with POP/IMAP).
Well I've never heard of, or used, any of them, so.......So what!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Looks my hunch wasn't that wrong, after all.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
in my previous line of work, I was a Maps JS dev. I always wondered who was using the Flash API... I guess now that answer is "no one."
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
That looks pretty helpful, almost like a synaptic for windows. Does it also get rid of the 'I have an update please do another cycle of clicks now' popups that so many windows applications have?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Ironically, Google Desktop is the only Desktop search that actually works in Linux (at least on GNOME)! Every thing else is either horribly broken, horribly slow, or lacks basic functionality. Sad to see this go.
will they go on sale soon?
They better not discontinue Google Voice and Apps (the free version)! Man I just ported my number and domain over. Sigh.
Create a filter to apply a label to all in:chats
then export using IMAP
Sigh. What did I just say? Unless something changed in the last two weeks or so, this doesn't work. Chat logs don't appear in IMAP folders, even when you label them.
So, I suppose all that talk about our notebooks being safe and always available and respecting the time and work we'd invested in their use was just a lie? This, combined with Chrome's increasingly "We're Google--we can do whatever we want" functionality, is edging me closer to abandoning Google completely. I, years ago, was initially hesitant to begin using Google's products. Really, the tipping point was that there weren't many alternatives to the services that Google was providing. THAT IS NO LONGER TRUE, GOOGLE! You would do well to remember that!
ohk..
Since you hadnt mentioned applying labels to them, or using the "move to inbox" function, I guessed you hadnt tried those
Of all these services, this upsets me the most. No where was I able to find a nice installer/packge manager for windows that installed all these packages automatically w/o any cruft or addons, and kept it all up-to-date.
Also, I seriously dispute their claim of "rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps". There are a whole host of benefits that downloadable software give, that web apps do not. (like, when the provider stops supporting the software, you still have access to it .....)
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
No problem. What you described actually worked for a while after they introduced IMAP. But for some unknown (technical?) reason they started filtering the chat logs.
The only ways to export them now seems to be through Gears (which they don't support anymore), or using some kind of scrubber script (which will guaranteed block your account if you download too much).
This is still a widely-used API by Flash developers, and developers have been trying to get google to add Street View support to the Flash API for a couple years (ironic since google first implemented Street View using Flash) and they always refused. Now I understand why. Unfortunately the things you can do with Maps in Javascript is pretty limited compared to Flash (integration with multimedia content, for example), so I suspect many will seek out competitors. I'm honestly a bit shocked...how many developers does it take to keep the Flash API in parity? Not enough to even register as a blip on their financials. This is a political decision.
*preparing to get anti-Flash replies from the javascript zealots any second now...*
It's important to note that at least for Google Notebook, they gave two years between stop accepting new accounts and actual shut down.
I'd love to have two years of warning for any of the paid services I subscribe to, let alone free ones.
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Google desktop widgets were an annoyance but the desktop search works very well in a small business environment where the files are stored on NAS or SAMBA servers.
I really hope that Google could produce a Chrome Local Search Plugin that replicates the search functionality that was in Google Desktop.
It would be a killer app if Google was also to include two way file merge functionality ( unison or two way rsync ) with removable media, remoter servers, other desktop computers and Google doc accounts
Their search results are progressively more useless with every passing day. How about they work on the product that got them big in the first place?
Also, when I read the list of programs that are being cancelled, I went, "never heard of it" to all of them.
I love fast flip. :-(
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No longer a place for invention and creativity - now its just about the money. And that spells lack of creativity, and eventually death when you run out of money to buy other companies for.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
is Google notebook. I still use it every other day and even patched the .xpi to install on newer versions of Firefox. Can anyone recommend a good replacement?
I have just tried it, and it doesn't work. Labelled chat history entries do show up in the label folder in GMail, but if you check that same folder via IMAP, it's empty.
However, in those cases you can switch to another provider and get essentially the same thing. Not so with software, which is much more variable. I rather would want to be able to _keep_ the software I like as long as I like. Perhaps the person you're responding to sees this in a similar way.
where i sell che-t-shirts, on ebay. they would be made in china, you can get super cheap labor there... also no fucking unions!
I rarely feel confident about using any google service, because google axes their new services so frequently.
I wish google would put more thought into what is worth their while to create. And, once google decides to create something, I wish they would put their full effort into it. and really try to that project a success. Instead, google seem to just throw projects out onto the web, willy-nilly.
check out Xobni (probably xobni.com?) it's an outlook plugin that has full text search across all inboxes, threading, etc. etc. i've been using it for a year now.
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
Just to pile on: ninite.com.