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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?
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
I hate to break it to you, but every vendor has its own agenda.
That's my freaking point, isn't it. Cloud means they get to pull the rug from under you. Most moderate to large companies and savvy individuals shoudl keep their own data in their own hands and keep at least binaries of what they want to run out of the control of the vendor. Yes it is more work and more money. Yes you can get it wrong so you have to make an effort not to. But software as a service and your apps and data on the cloud is a cancer to your ability to do anything with your own data.
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/
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.