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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
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they're so intent on finding money in everything, why not start charging people for a version of it?
Simple, people won't pay for it. There is a lot of interesting psychology that goes on and at the present, people are unwilling to pay for simple online software based services. The basic problem is that people aren't being paid nearly enough for the jobs they are doing for corporations and are therefore much more conservative in their spending.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The value is in your data, collecting it is their priority. If not enough people are using a service, or if Google cannot glean enough valuable data from the service, then they will kill it. Monetizing a service means less users and less data, and they are not about to shoot themselves in the foot like that.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
They've always had the best backwards compatibility of any OS.
No they've always had the best backwards compatibility of any OS you've used. But you've not used OS/390.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.