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Google Code Disables New Project Creation, Will Shut Down On January 25, 2016
An anonymous reader writes GitHub has officially won. Google has announced that Google Code project creation has been disabled today, with the ultimate plan to kill off the service next year. On August 24, 2015, the project hosting service will be set to read-only. This means you will still be able to checkout/view project source, issues, and wikis, but nobody will be able to make changes or new commits. On January 25, 2016, Google Code will be shut down. Google says you will be able to download tarballs of project source, issues, and wikis "throughout the rest of 2016." After that, Google Code will be gone for good.
It has gotten to the point that I shudder at the thought of relying on Google for anything beyond search and email. I fear that I will use something of theirs only to have it shut down out of nowhere. I would never use them for anything mission critical.
So much for it being a reliable store of data. That's the unreliable bit.
They want you to put all your data in the cloud but then don't guarantee it will be stored properly.
It's not unreliability...
If it's not worth spending money to keep developers on the project, then better to shutter it, and have people move off than just let it sit abandoned indefinitely... right?
I mean, that's what makes sense in the real world...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Google is weird in that they'll quickly abandon anything that they aren't #1 or #2 in, or that they don't think they're going to achieve that (rationally or not). So you have to consider that when you look at their offerings. Gmail isn't going anywhere, because it's #1. Same with search, same with Youtube, same with Google Maps. Anything else is more iffy. Google Fiber is probably pretty safe, since there isn't any good competition for it in its local markets. G+ seems to be safe for now because they refuse to give it up, but I wouldn't rely on it. Google Docs seems fairly safe, since its main competition is Office365 but again you never know. But anything smaller, I wouldn't rely on it because it's just too likely they'll pull the carpet out from under your feet.
It's really odd, and honestly a shame. A healthy market requires more than 2 strong competitors, and lots of other companies are perfectly happy to be #3, #4, or #5, or even farther back. Just because you're a big company doesn't mean you need to be #1 in everything you do. Just look at a lot of the Japanese conglomerates: they hang in there for ages, as long as they're profitable. At the end of the day, that's really all that matters in business: are you in the black, able to pay your salaries and expenses, and perhaps generating a profit? If so, you're succeeding. It's when you're in the red and it doesn't look like you're going to pull out that you need to throw in the towel and try something else.
Everything else is just an attempt to grab personal data. What did you think would happen?
All their products should be thought of as experiments with a shelf life.
So what happens when you have uploaded 100TB to Google NearLine and in a year they discontinue it?
Yet it's not free: Google mines your data every time you interact with them.
Google Code? They mine your IP address (do they user supercookies?) and record that along with the million other things one does on the web.
Too bad archive.org is not a dynamic thing, instead of a static view of websites past...
You could call it "parallelinternet.org", where you could fork behavior of any website at any time and have its functionality live on forever even after a company dropped support for the original.
I know that's not very feasible, but it's nice to dream.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which is why I advise my customers against using a Google service until it has become huge, with Google there is huge and there is gone, and nothing in between. We've seen time and time again since the IPO that anything that isn't generating major buzz? Is as good as dead.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Google, with all their rockrstar 10x programmers and engineers fail yet again. What's the point of hiring "only the best" through a series of day long gruelling interview processes and obscure ego inflating (for the interviewers) exams - when all the software they write ends up in the trash. Their only good products are the search engine, gmail (getting marginal), and youtube (bought from someone else). Two hit products for such a massive company of the world's best software engineers seems like a pretty big let down.
Nothing good ever seems to come out of these massive, lumbering, over managed companies. Their two decent products came at a time when they were much smaller. All the innovation is coming from small, lean and agile companies who take risks. Google is just the next Microsoft, ready to crest the wave any time now.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.