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Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos (engadget.com)
Google has been steadily migrating its resources towards the Photos ecosystem since the company first announced it at last years I/O developers conference. Today, Google announced that it will shut down Picasa. Starting May 1st, Google will start phasing out Picasa from its product lineup, moving over to Google Photos.
I have been working on scanning and organizing our family photographs for a few years, now. I've enjoyed using Picasa for certain features, such as facial recognition. I appreciate geotagging. I haven't done much with the touch-up tools or anything. I'm mainly working on getting them all digitized, not on making them pretty. I keep them backed up on a separate hard drive that's not in my home. I organize the originals into a set of binders with the hope of never having to open them again and just making new prints of any photo that someone wants.
I have absolutely zero interest in uploading my family photos to Google. I don't know exactly why Google wants them. Presumably, as a corpus to improve their image processing technologies. I realize that nobody else cares about our photos. If they started leaking through my Google+ account or at any of the other various points where I interface with Google, it wouldn't be a grand disaster. Still, the idea does not sit right with me. Not everything has to be on the Internet. Storing my photos at Google doesn't make them better, it just means that I've lost control of them.
Now, get off my lawn!
The website is what I'll miss (picasaweb.google.com). It gives you access to the same photos as photos.google.com, but has a lot of options which are missing in the latter site, like managing albums. If they transition that capability to the Photos site, then all will be fine.
But if they insist on the dumbed-down so easy a caveman could do it approach that Photos currently uses, I'm going to have to figure out some other way to present my photos online. I recently learned that Amazon gives me unlimited photo storage with my Prime account. And not limited to 2048x2048 resolution like with Photos (if you want free unlimited storage) - I've already switched my phone's photo backup to Amazon.
It's Google. They are notorious for stripping away useful functionality and switching around entire services for no reason. I don't use Picasa or Google Photos, but you can be sure that whatever they took away will remain gone in the new service.
This is why I stopped trusting things like Google Drive. I have no confidence that tomorrow they won't say they are removing some key functionality or that they are migrating the service to something else or that they are shutting it down completely. This is why local storage will always be king. I can be certain that nothing is going to happen to my stuff.
"They've adapted the old Microsoft method (adapted, of course, to make it not evil):
Embrace, Un-extend, Extinguish "
No, that hasn't been the case because there has been no need for it.
Look: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is not chosen by chance and it only works on said order.
You first need to start with something already popular and with an obvious leader.
Then you first embrace the technology of your competitor so users can move from your competitor to you, and you do it in a funneled way: easy to move from your competitor to you, difficult to impossible to do it the other way.
After that you Extend your competitor's technology so users *do* migrate from him to you because of the added (or percieved) benefit. If the Extend step is working, after a no-return point you extend in non-compatible ways, on one hand just to follow your strategy from the Embrace step, and to take advantage of the network effect to put your competitor pinning for the fjords on the other.
Once your competition is not a risk any more, you enter the Extinguish step were you go where you really wanted from the beginning.
For the most perfected example of Microsoft's application of this model see what they did to Novell, starting in the days of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups with its end on Windows 2000 Server.
But Google is not doing this (not here, at least): Google was not even trying to funnel users away from other photo albums, much less from Picasa. They just bought it and, since Picasa was a Google's competitor no more, there was no need for the Extend step, therefore there were no Extend step.
Google Photos could be the greatest thing ever, but it's too late for that. No thank you, I will pass on adopting Google's latest momentary fancy.
Google can't be trusted as a custodian of users' valuable data. Google has the attention span of a sleep-deprived toddler. In the past, it created amazing products, which I wove into my life. Then Google got bored and dropped those products, replacing them with other products I didn't like as much, again and again.
The incentive to destroy and replace products is baked in to Google's performance management ritual. I'm weary of the resulting churn and refuse to be burned again. In addition, I'm fed up with Google's fixation on low-contrast designs. I'm patiently disentangling myself of all Google dependencies.
Disclaimer: I was a software engineer at Google for four years. Hello to a friend who still works on Google Photos...