Google Keep End-of-Life Date Forecasted

An anonymous reader writes "A smart aleck journalist for UK's Guardian newspaper has turned the tables on Google by compiling data on 39 of the company's terminated projects, summarized in a table and bar graph. The mean lifespan of the doomed products turns out to be almost exactly 4 years, which led Mr. Arthur to conclude that your data would be safe with Google Keep — until March 2017, give or take a few months. Of course, this assumes that Keep is destined to be one of those products and services that wouldn't be Kept, or rather 'didn't gain traction with users' in the familiar lingo of Google marketing."

Comments

I don't understand all the anger over Google

[i_ate_god]

Yeah, I miss things like Code Search.

Well that's the only thing I used really.

But like, no one had to pay for these services. There was no contractual obligation in play. What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?

Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google

[Trepidity]

They don't have to. People are just pointing out that Google has a pattern of introducing services as trial balloons, and then discontinuing them a few years later if it doesn't fit into their overalls strategy. If you understand that and are okay with it, no problem. If you'd rather not have to scramble to find a replacement in a few years in the (not that unlikely) circumstance where the service is shut down, however, you might want to look elsewhere.

Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google

[jockm]

People are just pointing out that Google has a pattern of introducing services as trial balloons, and then discontinuing them a few years later if it doesn't fit into their overalls strategy.

There is another term for that: Let a thousand flowers bloom. This is what Google has always done, try things. The things that work, that have an audience that can justify continued operation then they live. The ones that don't fail.

This is no different than how most companies work. The backlash against Readers closure is silly. Products fail, companies pivot, they aren't required to keep things going in perpetuity.

And Google lets you get your data out, which so many other failed products don't.

Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google

[SirGarlon]

But like, no one had to pay for these services.

It's not about licensing cost, it's about migration cost.

Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google

[grahamtriggs]

Oh, I get the point that we are not entitled to use these products, because we aren't paying for them.

But there are two points, really:

1) Anger is a way of expressing that people do actually care about the services. If they shut them down with nobody saying anything, then they are right. Conversely, if lots of people kick up a fuss, maybe they see that they are wrong (in thinking that people don't use it).

2) And this one is particularly pertinent to things like Google Sync/Exchange ActiveSync. Just because users aren't paying for the services, doesn't mean that they wouldn't. If I had the option to simply upgrade my Google Mail to a paid apps account / simply pay to retain the features that they are cutting from the free account, then maybe I would. I would *certainly* pay for a "Google Apps for Home", which kept Google Reader, EAS (upgraded to work with Outlook 2013), etc.

But they don't offer that option. That I don't pay for these services, isn't my fault in not seeing the value. It is their fault in providing the option.

Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google

[afgam28]

There was no contractual obligation in play. What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?

There's no contractual obligation for users to put on a happy face either. The fact is that it's kinda annoying when a service that you've come to rely on gets shut down.

Google doesn't have a responsibility to provide free services to everyone but it is in their interest to build trust amongst their user base. Otherwise no one is going to invest any time into things like Google Keep.

Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google

[skids]

This deserves a car analogy.

Suppose a private individual decides to allow drivers to use some of his privately owned land to take a shortcut to avoid a swamp.

Now suppose there are competing grits delivery companies. Delivery Companes A and B start using the shortcut, and they sell off their SUVs because they no longer have to muck through the swamp. Company C uses the shortcut, but since he cannot trust it to stay there, he holds on to the SUVs. Company C goes out of business because Companies A and B don't need to buy as much gasoline since they do not have SUVs, and they underbid company C for new contracts.

Then the private individual decides he wants to close the shortcut to build a large statue of Natalie Portman.

The business of grits delivery being one with tight margins, Company A and B cannot afford to buy SUVs on such short notice. Company A goes bankrupt trying to finance SUVs, and Company B just stops grits delivery to people that live on the other side of the swamp.

Now nobody on the other side of the swamp has any grits at all. Sure they all saved a few pennies on 4AM deliveries of hot grits in the meantime, but it wasn't worth going cold turkey.

The moral of the story is that building something useful but ephemeral, especially if the stability of that thing is unpredictable, destabilizes markets by playing on their inherent vulnerability to human greed and shortsightedness. There may be zero legal obligation to ensure the stability of the service, and your standard disclaimers in the EULA that you can end it at any time may protect you from any sort of legal action, but for a company with a "do no evil" motto, marketing, advertising, and then killing such a product tends to produce consequences far from their stated ideal.

Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google

[jockm]

No my argument is that nothing is really ever assured. Anything and anyone can fail. Asteroids hit the earth, fires burn down houses, hard drives die, commercial software can fail to find a market, etc etc etc.

The world of software is littered with the corpses of dead companies and products. It has always been thus. Even free software can end up orphaned and so unmaintained it won't work on modern systems. It is foolish to believe any product will exist forever.

In the same way you should have a good 3, 2, 1 Backup strategy for your data, you should have a plan for what to do if products you rely on stop working.

I really don't get your point...

Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google

[hairyfish]

So the object lesson is: if you depend of a software product, make sure you depend on a popular software product. Otherwise, expect to be inconvenienced (or worse) sooner rather than later.

Which is precisely why people stick with MS. Regardless of what you think of their engineering or business practices, there is a certain amount of security in using the products that everyone else is using.

Re:companies discontinue software

[BLToday]

You can still keep using the old software and your data. In Google's case, once the service is gone so is your data. Think of it this way, Honda discontinues the RSX they don't go and blow up all the RSX they've sold. The time, data and energy you put into an online service is your investment and when it's discontinued you lose that investment.

Struck a Nerve

[Grizzley9]

Google seems to have reached the tipping point when they cancelled Reader. Now, their main base of loyal geeks are starting to question them, in print no less. This is not a good sign for Google. They are taking a much larger PR hit than just losing some respect from a few Reader users. Granted many of those services likely did need to be cut, or not even started, but it seems they've now pushed enough to where geeks are starting to push back and relaying that mistrust to their non-geek friends.

Re:headlines write themselves!

[Junta]

Even docs and drive aren't guaranteed. That's the whole thing with hosting services, they could disappear and there would be nothing you can do about it. So anything on cloud storage provider better be backed up by you, and applications to manage the content should either be free or you should have a persistent license and ability to run not tied to the continued whims and welfare of the vendor.