Slashdot Mirror
Google To Shutter Knol, Wave, Gears
An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today on its official blog the impending closure of a number of its less successful services. In addition to retiring minor features like Bookmarks List and Friend Connect, Google has outlined a plan to close down Wave. The experimental communication medium will go read-only on January 31, and on April 30 they will shut it down completely. Also on April 30, Google will be changing Knol so that individual knols are not viewable, though users will still be able to download and export them until October 1, at which point they'll disappear entirely. Google Gears is also getting the axe, as is Search Timeline and the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative."
I cannot take them seriously anymore. Anyone to use them for business would be insane.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
However you will still be able to see ads for words you're searching for.
...oddly enough, Google absolutely FAIL at marketing.
I'm not even kidding.
How the hell they became the biggest damn advertiser on the web I will never know, they are hopeless at doing anything right.
You want to know who they remind me of? Remember Malcolm In The Middle? Google is Malcolm!
Awkward, obtuse, but somehow stupidly intelligent. Stupidly intelligent is probably the best way to describe Google.
Seriously, why cancel Gears? Gears was USEFUL. It never needed that much attention as it was, and it was supposed to fill in for things that weren't quite ready in the HTML5 spec.
They say they ditched it because "it is no longer needed" or some nonsense. Funny, I can't remember when the ability to be able to drag and drop files in to web apps was added, last I checked, the File API is still in planning even now.
Gotta love that brilliant Offline Gmail we don't have anymore. Whats that, you released an extension for it? BRILLIANT IDEA, SOMETHING ELSE THAT ISN'T STANDARD AND WILL LIKELY HAVE TO BE KEPT UP TO DATE TOO, JUST LIKE GEARS.
Absolute lunacy.
This is the influence of Steve Job's on Google. It'll be interesting to see if the google culture survives this.
Google Health too.
This is Google's big problem right now - throw a bunch of things at the wall and see what sticks. The problem is people are now hesitant to invest in new Google projects because, hey, they'll be shut down in a year... If they can't commit to a new project, why should their customers?...
They cancel them because no one really uses them.
For sufficiently imprecise definition of "no one". What you means is no one you personally care about.
Welcome to the cloud, where abandonware is truly dead and nostalgia is a thing of the past. This is what happens when you hand the keys to the kingdom to a service provider with their own motivations and that do not care about you.
And thanks for re-affirming the lesson Google. I now try to use Google for nothing except search and perhaps Google Earth on rare occassions. They've even managed to turn me off Picasa with glaring bugs like losing face data you spend hours entering.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Google Wave - collaboration. Stopped early on. Now Google Docs allows real-time simultaneous editing by multiple users. If that isn't collaboration, I dunno what is. It might have nifty features that Doc doesn't have, but starting ten sections in the same company to do the same job is what I'd consider stupid (and standard practice).
Google Gears - Holy crap! That thing is still alive?
Google Search Timeline - I'm confused. What does Trends show us then?
Re<C - They admit they're not the best suited for the job. So they publish their results and continue using renewable energy.
Google Friend Connect - Dunno what that is, but seems kinda outa place now that Google+ (showing no signs of premature death) is here.
Knol - This one is a bit sad. But then they worked with others to start Annotum.
Bookmark Lists - Meh.. With sharing links on fb and Google+ whenever we spot something interesting, who'll bother with this?
"I will not use other successfully products by company X because they cancel support for products that I don't use and others don't either." Intelligent.
Let me fix that for you. "I refuse to become reliant for basic service on a vendor that clearly has their own agenda and will happily cancel those services without regard to what I want or need".
You can make anything sound unintelligent with careful paraphrasing to reductio ad absurdum, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it actually is unintelligent.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Google Health too.
So you're saying the prognosis for Google Health is not good?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...but what does it have to do with cupcakes?
Google Bookmarks Lists—Date was December 19, 2011. All your bookmarks are belong to recycle bin.
Google Friend Connect— On March 1, 2012 you will face the fact that you have no friends.
Google Gears—To be jammed December 1, 2011
Google Search Timeline—Now history!
Google Wave—Wave goodbye on January 31, 2012
Knol—Stop seeking the Oracle on April 30, 2012
Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (REC)—Redirecting enviro-bullshit, capt'n.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
What you hear in this announcement is the sound of a "cloud" evaporating.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It's not even a seprate product, just a useful interface to search (they've since hidden away).
Very useful to explore news coverage, prevalence of terminology, etc.
Gears' and Wave are non-news, previously announced... indeed Gears has been death row almost a year now
Were that I say, pancakes?
Google Xoom. On second thought, maybe they already killed it and nobody even noticed.
Knol will never be Wikipedia and it was kinda wrong to try to make a competitive online encyclopedia product... like starting your own competing nunnery right next door to Mother Theresa's place. I jumped on the bandwagon with both Wave and Google+ but ulimately stopped using both. The problem with Wave is that even though it had a lot of useful features, it was too much to ask all of the people I collaborate with to switch to it as well... we already collaborate and we already share content and make revisions etc etc. We weren't exactly looking for a whole new system for collaboration. Google+ is basically a huge CRM system for advertisers and the fact that they won't give you an account without your real name being attached to it is a little odious really. I am sure it too will be discontinued.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
Still use it nearly every day. I was hoping they would open it up and my friends and I could host it on our own server.
So much potential wasted.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/solar-may-be-cheaper-than-fossil-power-in-five-years-ge-says.html
Is that why Google has stopped work on the solar power tower design with heliostats?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Time to get a new handle, shill. We're following you now Microsoft Bob.
It was the most Sun Microsystems like thing Google has ever did.
Also an angel backed company I started folded because Google didn't keep their promise to open source wave.
In 2009 I was at Google I/O when Vic Gundotra got up and stage and enthusiastically said that Wave was going to be completely open sourced, entirely and without reservation. That never happened. I think because it had dependencies on stuff Google didn't want to open source. Instead Google announced they would develop an open source clone of Wave called Wave in a Box, later renamed Apache Wave.
To this day, if you download the Wave source code and compile it from the tip of the 3 different repositories it's stored in (git, svn, and an old hg repo) the build is broken. If you get it compiling, it does not work. It was the worst, most mismanaged tech program in Google's short history. As someone who still has a fairly big interest in the tech of Wave it's kind of disappointing to not see the market / community hold Google to account on this. A big disappointment.
That's about all Google can do. GMail? Please, it's nothing special that can't be gotten anywhere else.
So apart from search which is getting more useless every day because of those fake farm links websites, and maps, there's nothing you can rely on from Google.
With so many dead projects, I'm never touching anything from them ever again. That includes Google+, which is probably going to close in a few weeks.
It could just be part of Larry Page's first year as CEO. Google may or may not keep shuttering projects at this rate.
It's like that episode of TNG, "Conspiracy". The leadership at Google has been infiltrated by aliens (or bean counters), and they're suddenly making decisions based on very different criteria. Google's making money hand-over-fist--they don't need to cut projects to pad the bottom line. But that's exactly what they're doing now--that and ruining the UIs of their best services. Google's eventual decline has begun sooner than expected. They're abandoning the formula that's gotten them where they are. Time to prep the lifeboats and prepare our own ships.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
The release products before they are complete. It would help if they waited until products were ready for prime time before releasing them.
The line:
"In addition to retiring minor features like Bookmarks List and Friend Connect"
Should be read as:
"In addition to retiring minor features like +, Bookmarks List and Friend Connect"
(I did not even take the time to search, but I assumed Google Plus is a minor feature already retired).
What the fuck Google? I like Google as a company, I really do, but this is a shit move however you look at it. They don't have to support any more updates to Knol, but why the hell not jsut host the pages as static content? That wouldn't break the bank and would definitely generate some good will. Or at least, stem a fuckton of ill-will.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Hope you've got an easy way to get all your data back and can unhook all your applications cleanly.
Google are cutting costs in advance of the onrushing double dip. Jobs will be next.
This is what'll happen to any "cloud" service which isn't making money. Utility computing, you don't pay enough you get cut off. Live with it.
Deleted
That keeps launching and killing things. And mismanaging things.
Wave was a brilliant collaboration tool that was under developed and killed too early.
Why would I put anything inside someone's cloud when every month they announce new closures, and terminations. There was a time where Google released stuff, and people were allowed to use that 'stuff' and the google machine paid for it, and you knew where you stood. The company is now operating in an opposite direction. You now don't know if they launch something, wether you can invest time in it. You don't know if it will stay up or be yanked.
And - if you took time and for example liked Wave - they renaged on their promises, and not only announced its end - buit have not done what they said they would do. They have not made good on their public statements.
Anyone who deals with cloud based companies that:-
1. Breach trusts and don't commit fullt to what they state they will do
And
2. End services and support just because it suits them, irrespective of what it may cost you.
Is a cloud company to be wary of. This is not the behaviour of early google, and its showing.
We`re all equal
Is there something similar out there, in google-land or elsewhere?
It seems that Google Wave has be transferred to the Apache Foundation in some form.
http://incubator.apache.org/wave/
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
You know, when you hear that some TV star from your childhood dies and you immediately think, "I didn't know he was still alive." Well, that's the same reaction I have every time I hear that Google has killed a product: "I didn't even know that product existed."
Surely,I can't be the only one who has this reaction.
Even though publishing Windows desktop software is completely orthogonal to your overall business strategy and it's a symptom of your dysfunctional, undisciplined management...please don't cancel Sketchup.
Advice: on VPS providers
I know Gmail and search surely won't go away but aside form those can you *really* trust they'll support the product? They either need to show more willingness to keep at it or don't release shit to the public that's not ready.
Hmm.. But that has been the theme on slashdot about Microsoft since its existence. And yet there never has been any evidence showing that Microsoft employees or any firm hired by Microsoft have ever been instructed to post on Slashdot while disguising their posts as coming from outside Microsoft. I don't see you jumping up and down about this then. Somehow when its Google's turn all of a sudden you people come out to defend "logic" and "rationality".
All kidding aside though, I recall someone advertising a Knol as being "the basic, fundamental unit of knowledge," (what I was always taught was called a "fact"). If a Knol is a unit of knowledge, Google, then what's the name for a unit of failure? The Fayl?
I hereby propose a new unit of failure, and humbly suggest that it be called the Fayl. The extremes of failure (or success) should be fundamental constants corresponding to totality and nothingness, hence total failure is 1.0 Fayls, and complete unqualified success is 0.0 Fayls. Naturally since any nonzero amount of failure would result in a decimal number of fayls with an ugly leading zero, I propose that just as decibels are used (the formal definition of the bel makes it an unwieldy unit for general use,) so we similarly should measure dissuccess (or failure, if you prefer) in decifayls. The abbreviation can be dFy.
To use it in a sentence, "The US Congress Debt Supercommittee achieved 10 decifayls in its efforts to come up with a compromise that would have prevented automatic spending-reduction measures previously signed into law from going into effect."
Unlike decibels, for simplicity, decifayls should be a linear scale, so that something that worked half the time would rate 5 dFy, rather than having to work the math on n*1/(10^0.3) which would correspond to 7 dFy if it were logarithmic for 50% success, and about 4 dFy for 75% success, etc. Being able to multiply and divide by adding and subtracting is all well and good in the realm of communications technologies and engineering, but for the lay-person, I think a linear scale is much easier to understand.
The holy grail then, in our culture, is to achieve 0 dFy.
When a project gets the axe like this, it is rated 10 PdFy, (for ten *presumptive* decifayls, meaning that even if it worked, the fact that the owners killed it and no one will be able to use it in the future implies a condition of complete and total failure. So most Google projects seem to end at a dissuccess level of 10 dFy. I would prefer the term dissuccess to failure in this case: Google seems to kill off everything it produces eventually. That is, if I may paraphrase Tyler Durden, on a long enough time line, the survival rate for every one of Google's projects drops to zero. In a sense, everything Google does seems doomed to eventual failure. For a company as successful and influential as Google to have so many things (everything, seemingly...) called "failures" is paradoxical. Hence, their old projects should I think, instead, be termed "dissuccesses".
Note: dissuccess, Fayl, decifayl(s), and dFy are words or expressions I made up, (Googled them, and no hits!) BUT I release them for noncommercial use by the general public under the Creative Commons 3.0 license, CC: BY-NC-ND.
~ Doug
Wow it was great!! Sexshop
Sexshop