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

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

[cultiv8]

What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?

It would be nice if they open-sourced these projects and then let the "minority of people" who actually use it maintain it themselves.

downside of SaaS

[crgrace]

This really is a big negative of Software as a Service. When you own something, you can run it forever, even if the developer decides to stop using it.

I have some simulation software for electrical design that was last updated in 1998. Still works fine and gets the job done. If it were on the cloud I'd be out of luck and forced to continually move my data between paid services. Too bad.

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

[drcln]

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?

It's not hate, its disgust at the stupidity of it all. Google created these ancillary products to draw people into the Googlesphere, and it worked. As someone from Google has said "The lifetime value of a Chrome user is enormous." Google's ancillary projects drew in people and Google prospered.

In the short term, Google can kill the products that are marginally effective in drawing in new eyeballs, but that sound you hear as they cancel projects that drew people in is the sound of people heading for the exits. That smoke is from the burning of bridges.

Google's near sighted cancelation of today's well liked projects is erecting barriers to acceptance of its future offereings. Google's real product is people, and Google is polluting its product stream with disapointed people who are tiring of learning to use a tool only to have it taken away. Not a good long term strategy.

I won't be using Google+, or Google Docs, or or Google Drive, or Keep, or Google's NIK software, or Chrome, and definitely not a Chromebook, since any of these can disapear or be rendered unusable on a whim.