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A Eulogy For Every Product Google Has Ruthlessly Killed (145 and Counting) (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Tez. Trendalyzer. Panoramio. Timeful. Bump! SlickLogin. BufferBox. The names sound like a mix of mid-2000s blogs and startups you'd see onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt!. In fact, they are just some of the many, many products that Google has acquired or created -- then killed.
While Google is notorious for eliminating underperforming products -- because even though these products often don't cost much for ongoing operations, they can pose a serious legal liability for the company -- it's rare to hear them spoken of after they've been shuttered. In fact, Killed By Google is the first website to memorialize them all in one place. Created by front-end developer Cody Ogden, the site features a tombstone and epitaph for each product the company has killed since it originated.
While Google is notorious for eliminating underperforming products -- because even though these products often don't cost much for ongoing operations, they can pose a serious legal liability for the company -- it's rare to hear them spoken of after they've been shuttered. In fact, Killed By Google is the first website to memorialize them all in one place. Created by front-end developer Cody Ogden, the site features a tombstone and epitaph for each product the company has killed since it originated.
I weep for the most important thing Google has killed with them: the right to privacy and anonymity.
As for the products, they *have* to keep only the best ones: they're the trojan horses into people's lives. The products have to be so compelling that everybody feels they can't do without them, even at the cost of feeding Google their most intimate details. Excellent products are the keystone of their business model: no good products, no data.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I do like that they put things out there. They are too slow to remove the ones that don't work. I do think that they can do a better job of doing the old-school beta approach. I loved Inbox. Having to move back to Gmail in the past couple of months has been frustrating.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
#1. Increasing your own product line.
#2. Removing competition.
Both in the vast majority of cases becomes a negative to a free market because it foments monopoly. The more increased a product line is the more lock in you wind up getting into, even though increasing product line is "usually" beneficial. And with the removal of competition... well that is easy enough on its own.
Monopolies are not free-market, monopolies are products of lazy citizens that refuse to perform the "self-policing" that they often ignorantly attribute to "large corporations", yes large corporations advance this fallacy as well, and why when I hear people say it I just tell them that they are actually playing into the hands of big businesses. Sometimes monopolies are directly created by the very regulations that people put in to stop them... FCC is a great example of this.
I would propose that we ask for a "regulation" that prevents any one person or business from owning more than 1 product. If you are a search engine... that is all you get to be. If you make operating systems... you are not allowed to make hardware. If you make gaming systems... you don't get to make games. If you are a content provider... you don't get to own content! The only exception should be if they are first to market with the idea or concept they get a 10 year exception. For example, the first person to invent movies can also invent the tools to make, distribute, or show them. But after 10 years, they no longer get to exclusively make movies or the tools to make movies, or control their distribution, or control how they are shown.
There is way too much conflict of interest and today's regulations are all about controlling things the wrong way and the "regulate all the things" folks just are not understanding that... leading to just exactly this problem right fucking here!
Killed by Google!
Some former Google products haven't been killed, per se, but have been dumbed-down so badly that just killing them might have been a more merciful end.
(Yes, I'm looking at you, the poor maimed shell of the thing formerly known as Google Finance: http://sneakyfalcon.com/the-ne... ).
1. You get what you pay for. The entire point of each service is to see if they can monetize it. When the monetization fails to cover the expense of providing the service then they cut their losses. If you fail to recognize that you are the product when it comes to free web services then you're going to have a bad time.
2. Services, like everything on the web, are short-lived. So if you haven't recognized that "the cloud" is composed of computers you don't own and if you don't mirror your data elsewhere then you're going to have a bad time.
3. FOSS never dies. If you get a FOSS computer program that (doesn't rely on outside information and) you like then it will never abandon you. It might not be perfect, it's might be unsupported but at no point will someone take it away from you because it's on your computer and it runs on your computer.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Nik Software Suite, a great set of pro photography plugins for Photoshop. Google bought the company, harvested some of the IP into their crappy mobile apps, then did absolutely nothing with the main software. Ended up giving it away for free, then sold it to DXO who started charging for it again despite adding squat then went into bankruptcy. So much potential wasted.
http://https//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products/Did not know of all of these, recognize some of them. But the list is defiantly shorter than what they have killed.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
When a company like Microsoft or Google are notorious for killing off their products, users learn not to invest themselves in any new product because it is likely to stop functioning in the future. It's actually an industry problem. For anyone to learning something new is a waste of time because you know it's not going to last.
That is no way to run an industry, but the computer industry has been operated amateurishly for 4 decades, and to this day shows no signs of growing up.
Google basically throws services at a wall and sees what sticks. No actual plans. No strategy. And they throw it away as soon as it stops sticking, even if it's been around a while.
To me, this means one very simple thing: Don't use anything by google that doesn't already have a massive following cause you may find the rug pulled out from under you at any moment.
Apart from Android, AdSense and maps, there's really nothing Google makes that I would trust to depend on as a critical service.
I'm especially bitter about the loss of Google Reader, the RSS news feed aggregator. I got by with so-so replacements for a few years and finally rolled my own with FreshRSS on my home server.
While I do wish that Google didn't abandon/kill off so many things, how long would the list at Microsoft be of products that have been either purchased or developed in house and then killed or had their functionality for the rest of the world destroyed?
Then how many products that worked fine in version X of Windows are now broken due to lack of backward compatibility?
Then you could do the same thing with Linux or Apple or any other big company or group.
Blaming only Google for this annoying behavior seems a bit much.
How about a eulogy for all the people Boeing killed by not including a light to indicate when their "safety features" were malfunctioning as standard equipment?
I think the great thing about Google has been that they have been the only company to actually tell people how and in what ways people have traded their privacy for convenience.
Look at Verizon. They sold all your phone records (and presumably your internet records) to the government without even telling you. Oh and they made sure to lobby Congress to exempt them from privacy laws and agreements so they couldn't even effectively be sued by the customers they screwed over.
Looks like most of the telecoms did the same, probably. Hard to tell because of how unopen they are about it. Google early on decided to be very transparent about how much data they are collecting and what they are doing with it. And they have paid a PR price, somewhat undeservedly so. Apple I think has been a bit better about it because they do collect a lot of data about people, but have made clear they are not really in that business.
Be a bit more suspicious of Google as they are now too big to avoid being evil, but be a lot more suspicious about all the other companies you do business with and how much they are just selling everything they know about you to the highest and the lowest bidder alike.
And of course: https://duckduckgo.com/
This was a company that once gave employees 20% free time to work on whatever the heck they want and then attempted to monetise the result. This is the natural response to such a strategy. Yeah it may piss off a lot of people who use these products but you can't argue with $40bn / quarter as being a losing strategy.
For example, I can barely use my Google Voice number.
It migrated to hangouts, but hangouts seems to be a dead app that crashes on my phones now (I get a notification, but can't use it on two phones).
Is there still Google Voice? is it part of Hangouts? Was it wrapped into Google+ and that's why it died?
I really can't tell, and don't have the patience to figure out how since I mostly use it through my email at work anyway.
They also really need to add the find same photo from Picassa desktop app to the photos website. It's terribly annoying to know they have the tech from image search and don't let me use it.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Google not only kills the products, they consistently eviscerate the work flow, logic and configuration interfaces, such that it's a major time suck for administration. I don't mean visiting an application once every 6 months, I mean having to reacquaint with configurations and feature usability consistently after revisiting the application after a few days.
It's more than an inconvenient hassle on a random basis - it's continual. If you are having to use Google applications for any client projects - and you typically use a few at any given time for any single client - this is a drain of time/ effort both for the admin, the customer and potentially Google support. It sucks everybody's time.
$ curl https://killedbygoogle.com/
... 21 <meta> tags ...
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Killed by Google - The Google Graveyard & Cemetery</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="killedbygoogle"></div>
<script src="main.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
$ curl -v https://killedbygoogle.com/main.js
...
< content-length: 120768
...
Dear God, no.
A fitting captcha: outrages
First of all, it would be nice if Slashdot linked to the actual web page instead of to an ad-infested article.
Looking over the list, the one I miss the most is iGoogle; this allowed one to have a home page with news from other pages all grouped together. Many people miss Google Reader, an RSS client, but the glory days of RSS are long gone.
Google Chrome Frame is no longer needed; it was a product for an era when a web designer's job was 90% making their web page look decent in Internet Explorer and 10% actual web design. "Google Flu Trends" and "Google Flu Vaccine Finder" were created during the 2008-2009 flu panic (I remember entire malls being closed down in Mexico).
The others show that success in business is having a few hits and a lot of misses.
I'm just moving away from the internet altogether. I'll use Wikipedia and slashdot and that's about it, spending less and less time on the internet and feeling better for it. I did post under my actual name and picture but only false things that constantly conflict with previous posts. I guess I'll see what happens with that.
Common business practice is to form a distinct corporation for each of the products to limit liability for the product to just that subsidiary and not the parent Alphabet company.
Why do you think google split itself into a parent company Alphabet and Google? To limit liability from one part to the other.
If they're so intent on finding money in everything, why not start charging people for a version of it?
Seriously. Google is big enough, does enough business, has other things they charge for, why not have converted some of these to a paid service? Sure it sucks going from gratis to not-gratis, but if the alternative is to not have the service at all, then I would think a non-trivial number of people would pay for it. AFAIK, nothing in the law would keep them from continuing to make a product of those now paying for it if the concern of it not bringing in that thread of income on top of being paid.
Google is weird and has weird priorities.
Google Flu: You REALLY needed that, right? When you scroll through the list, most of them you've never heard of. For good reason. Most of them were useless or done better by other products
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
There is also the Google Cemetery web site.
While some of these were experimental in nature, and had a small population of users, it is a joke how a large company like Google kills so many products and services, even ones that have substantial number of users.
Google Reader, Google+, goo.gl URL shortner, Google Wave, Google Code, and on an on an on ...
How do they feel now that Microsoft owns github, the most used code repository and sharing web site? They could have had a viable competitor.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Nice list but think it may be missing a few things like Froogle for instance. It was like a marketplace section you could list your products. Probably early 00's.
Companies end unsuccessful products. That's nothing new. Microsoft even ends successful products though. There were a LOT of VB6 programmers very unhappy about VB.net, which wasn't really a continuation of Visual Basic, but more of a completely different product with some overlap with VB6. Microsoft also killed Works about 10 years ago, which had a long history.
How is Google any different?
Android seems to be next big target? Google Chrome OS following? Both replaced by Fuckya,,,ehem...Fuchsia?
4wdloop
Will be on that list soon. It served its purpose, prod the other telcos to roll out faster internet.
1. You get what you pay for. The entire point of each service is to see if they can monetize it. When the monetization fails to cover the expense of providing the service then they cut their losses. If you fail to recognize that you are the product when it comes to free web services then you're going to have a bad time.
In general - yes, you are right. But this is only true as long as enough people allow it. It doesn't really apply to me as much.
e.g. I use google maps to check traffic (on my phone) before heading into work. But my location is turned off. I use google maps from my computer, to find something or to check traffic. But I am not logged in with my google account.
So for those that don't know, google traffic uses google user's location info to be able to give traffic reports. It's really quite great - as long as people are willing to be tracked. I am not, but I am happy to use their service. I pay nothing for it, and for the most part I am not part of that product. But people in general are, whether they know it or not.
But I get your point, and everyone knows that people are the product for google. But they do put out revolutionary technology. Google maps is the most useful I can think of, google earth is pretty cool. I am sure people have their favorites. I have a hard time saying that being the product is bad simply because people are the product if it is voluntary. Where google is having a hard time staying on the good side is when that information no longer becomes private. Theoretically, if people are willing to trade their information for these features, and they are aware, it could be more bad than good. But it is a REAAAAALY thin line between the two. And to your #3 point... people should be allowed to give up their information, as long as I have the option NOT to do that.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Since they announced its impending death... I have been searching for a replacement and never found one. I tried dozens of apps and webservices... but none of them did what Inbox could do.
The best I've settled on right now is using normal GMail with the "Multiple Inboxes" option and really specific queries set up to fill each Inbox. That gives me 5 "Google Inbox" style inboxes... and then everything else just gets jumbled together.
It works ok - but I assume they'll even remove that option at some point :-(
Has anyone found a better alternative?
Early adopter of many google 'projects' only to be killed and booted off many times over. I have a feeling the games service will be no different unless they partner with some big games publishers.
The day will come when they decide to kill you.
I had a quick look, and Google Sets is missing from that list. It was used to complete lists of things and was more or less integrated into google search afterwards.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Because Google’s massive kill ratio makes users reluctant to try those products in the first place. Who wants to learn a newly introduced product that might summarily vanish tomorrow?
Let's go ahead and add Stadia to the list. It's only a matter of time.
Anyone have a list of the projects that doesn't require javascript to display?
I find it kind of sad a front end developer is unable to write a simple HTML/CSS page.
Google does to released software what the Fox TV network did to television programs.
Firefly, meet your new brother in exile: Inbox.
Google wasn't letting products launch whenever their employees called it 'done'. The level of fanfare to announcements was certainly uneven, but the net result is a bit of an oversimplification since that $40 billion is primarily from ads.
Postini already had a business model when they were acquired. So did Picasa. So did Orkut. If these weren't money makers, why did they buy them? If they were, why not let them make money? It's entirely possible for Google to have products that are pay-with-money rather than pay-with-privacy, yet they seem allergic to the possibility.
Yes, they are doing very well if the bottom line is the only line that matters. If that's the case, then 'good will' and 'customer confidence' are not directly reflected in that line, so it's of no surprise when those lines start to suffer.