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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.
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
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.
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!