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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."
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?...
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.
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
I will credit Google with letting people retrieve their data, but its usefulness is greatly reduced without the applications it was designed for.
They call it the cloud because people have gotten wise to being offered low prices on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
Yep yep.
Remember when knol was first introduced? It was supposed to be a "verified wikipedia", written by experts. Those experts (you, me, anyone) were to spend a lot of time, effort, and domain knowledge in writing high-quality articles... and in return we would receive a per-click royalty. This would incentivize the creation of actionable content that would something something revolutionize something synergy something leverage.
I remember thinking through the subjects for which I am credible authority, and considering whether to produce some knols in order to develop a bit of side income. I very seriously considered it... and judging from some of the knols I've seen, lots of other people went all the way.
Now we see how it all ends up. Just like the DRM game ended up. "Oh, sorry users, but this quarter we have decided that the project isn't profitable. Or we just hired a new VP and he's shaking things up. Or whatever. We're closing it down, so f*** you and your investment, you're just an externality."
I will now NEVER, EVER contribute content to a for-profit enterprise. Be it amazon reviews or knols or sidebar markups or whatever, that's it, I'm done.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE