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.

Comments

Google is now officially mature company

[ge7]

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".

Re:Google is now officially mature company

[WrongSizeGlass]

Some experiments succeed, some experiments fail. Google tries a lot more of these types of things than anyone else. Hopefully those who use these services will find something else to meet their needs.

Re:Google is now officially mature company

[Dogtanian]

But slashdotters should stop giving them free passes because they're "google".

Said it before and I'll say it again- the idea that most Slashdotters are uncritically in love with Google is out of date. It's undeniably true that up until around the mid-2000s there was a borderline fanboyish attitude of indulgence towards Google. However, that's changed quite noticeably in the past five or so years. While it may be argued that Google still gets cut more slack than they deserve, the era of "Google can do no wrong" being representative of most Slashdotters is now over.

WOW

[Jello B.]

Holy shit they're shutting down products I've never heard of and nobody uses. That's fuckin evil.

Re:Oh fuck off.

[ccguy]

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.

Time for everyone to ...

[MacTO]

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.

Re:Google Chrome Machine Install?

[brianez21]

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.