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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."
They cancel them because no one really uses them.
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.
I cannot take them seriously anymore. Anyone to use them for business would be insane.
Because all companies should support all products forever, even if no one uses them? What company does that?
I mean, look at Itanium, at this point the only way to keep Itanium alive would be to *pay* Intel to keep making them. Oh wait....
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
Well, we if we compare to Microsoft, at least MS has specific end of support dates that you know. Google will just come out of the shadows and announce that support will be ended in one month. And not just support - the whole product will be gone. With desktop products they still at least work. With Google, software-as-service, and cloud they're just gone. No sane business would build their future on such ground.
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
Wave was a cool idea that desperately needed a desktop client and more partners. It needed an Open Rich Mail Alliance a-la Android to sell servers, integrate with for-pay and for-free services, and actually use the protocol for real work.
As long as you had to go to the Google website to read a Wave it suffered from the perception that it was a Google service and was only useful in that way.
(On the other hand you could go totally conspiracy-minded and say that Wave was intended to fail, and Google was attempting to use it as a pilot plant for various Google+ features, at a time when the Diaspora was all the rage and people were casting about for open source alternatives to Facebook.)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
What you hear in this announcement is the sound of a "cloud" evaporating.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Wave was amazing.
And no one uses them because in early beta they are closed down.
I tried Wave and it didn't make any damn sense so I didn't use it any more.
How did it not make sense?
Fill text boxes with text, that is about it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
At least Google did the right thing with Wave and made it open source:
http://www.waveprotocol.org/wave-in-a-box
Still, I'll miss the old girl. At least I have hopes that eventually I'll have a company-wide Wave server to replace Wikis (which have horrible access control) and email (which is just horrible).
Wave also was slow as hell on older/weaker computers, a problem that only compounded as the wave got longer.
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
I agree completely.
We had a production issue one day, and the team was spread all over the country at the time. We decided Wave would be perfect for collaboration. Signing up was easy enough, but every conversation got threaded in weird ways, we couldn't figure out how to tell what had been read or not. It was a total mess. After an hour or so we gave up and just used a chat room.
I'm not saying it wouldn't have worked for us, but we could not figure it out.