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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.
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?
Microsoft keeps shit around for a long time, actually. You might not like their version of something they acquired, but the broad market generally does. MS's crime was taking products that nerds liked, and turning into products that normies liked. Bastards.
Then how many products that worked fine in version X of Windows are now broken due to lack of backward compatibility?
They've always had the best backwards compatibility of any OS. Windows 7 is still supported for another year, making it 11 years of support. Anything in C/C++ that actually followed the advice in the API docs never broke with a new OS version, until 64-bit OSs stopped running 16-bit apps (by which time GOG had almost every 16-bit app I actually cared about). Most software that got clever using APIs in unsupported ways will work if you pick the right OS version in the emulation dropdown. C# software just keeps chugging along, for better or worse.
That just isn't a fair complaint about MS.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
Heck, Gmail has been more persistent than any other email provider I ever had.
AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Erols, Earthlink, and email.com are still running. Prodigy is defunct now, but it was around for 27 years so Gmail can take their crown in 2031.
If we're allowed to count hosting providers, 1and1, GoDaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost, InMotion, and Verio all still exist, and have all offered e-mail longer than Google has.
If universities count, MIT is where e-mail started in the 1960's, and to this day if you were a student there, you can keep your MIT e-mail address for life. Many universities have similar policies. ...so if your e-mail host didn't outlast Gmail, there were plenty that didn't. They've still got a decade to go before they start turning heads for longetivity, though.