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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
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
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.
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.
They are too slow to remove the ones that don't work.
I disagree: I think them ruthlessly killing off "unpopular" products is actually harming adoption in general. I don't bother trying new google products since I don't want to get used to something when there's a 95% chance it'll disappear soon. I doubt I'm alone in this.
SJW n. One who posts facts.