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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".
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.
Holy shit they're shutting down products I've never heard of and nobody uses. That's fuckin evil.
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.
If you need to set up Chrome in a corporate environment, then you can use the .MSI installer for Chrome ("Chrome for Business"), which is available to download here.
kernel: lp0 on fire
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.
I won't miss it. I hated the way it interfaced. I'd see something interesting on the google news page within fast flip. I'd click on the article in fast flip to read it. Instead, it opened up into fast flip. I then had to click on the article a second time to read it. Annoying. Granted, maybe if you used fast flip to browse through news, one might like it. I was annoyed at the way it functioned from the google news page, enough so that I removed the whole sidebar. There were other problems I had with the sidebar so it wasn't the only reason for the removal, but fast flip wasn't missed by this user.
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
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!
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?
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.