Google Terminates Six Services

Jonah Bomber writes with this excerpt from Information Week: "In addition to Google's announcements about the elimination of 100 recruiting positions and the shutdown of offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden, the company said it would close Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, and Jaiku. It also said it's discontinuing the ability to upload videos to Google Video. ... Jaiku, however, will live on as an open source project. Gundotra said that Google engineers have been porting the microblogging service to Google App Engine and that when the migration is completed, the company plans to make the code available under the Apache license."

Re:Highlights one of the problems..

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't run anything business critical on something I couldn't replace very easily.

Does that actually apply to any of the services you mentioned? GMail provides POP and IMAP access. Calendar exports to .ics, and syncs with various programs. And with Docs, you can quickly download your files as a ZIP full of HTML files.

Indeed, it would be crazy to use any kind of service (paid or not) for something important and not make your own backups. But Google, at least in recent years, has done a pretty good job of allowing this.

Re:Highlights one of the problems..

[rolfwind]

This just highlights one of the negative aspects of using services out there on the net - if it's not running on your physical hardware it can be closed when the company decides it's not profitable to carry on with it. In the case of these services I doubt there's anyone relying on them to do business, but that definitely isn't the case for things that run in the various compute clouds, or small companies migrating to things like Google Docs, GMail or Google Calendar.

In the case of gmail and those apps, since it's out for domains that actually pay Google for the service - I suppose the risk isn't as severe at all and I would definitely recommend using Google to host school email (not all business for other reasons) as it can save a lot of money and provide much better end user experience.

It's about calculated risk and perspective. The specific google services you mentioned are very low risk of being discontinued. The actual ones being discontinued had good reasons: Google Video was redundant with Google owning youtube. Google notebook seems redundant with Google Docs imo. I don't know enough about the others, but they are not in the same league as gmail, which probably is almost as important to google as is its search in some ways.

Alternatives for Google Notebook?

[GraphiteCube]

I have quite a number of bookmarks and notes stored in Google Notebook, I wonder if there are similar web-based services available on the net? Actually Google Notebook is very handy, especially when you are not using your computer and want to jot down some notes.

Re:Highlights one of the problems..

[lukas84]

But our Exchange system now is creaking under its own weight, fails to backup shockingly often, and is down more than 99.9% monthly SLA [google.com] that Google Apps offers. Scaling up the Exchange server would require a significant cash outlay, and I'm not convinced it would be any cheaper over the lifetime of the system.

Let me guess, you're still running Exchange 2003?

Re:Hmm

[htnmmo]

I was recently looking over Google's AdSense revenues and noticed that they were quite low.

While their own site's earnings have been growing, the earnings of their AdSense publishers has leveled off.

The cut they take from AdSense revenues has also gotten smaller and smaller. I was wondering if Google might abandon AdSense [howtonotma...online.com] all together because of it.

What's probably keeping AdSense alive is the $500 million they keep in the bank because of their net 60 payment terms and because people don't get paid until they reach $100.

Half a billion dollar hit wouldn't look nice.

Seems like they're working on improving the results in that area, but these other services just couldn't be monetized properly.

It's nice though. If Google were to give every service online away for free, it would leave little room for other developers to grab a piece off the (shrinking?) pie.

Re:Suggestions for alternative to Google Notebook?

[msuarezalvarez]

The similarity between http://notebook.zoho.com/ [zoho.com] and the usual Google login pages is strong enough to qualify as phishing...

Re:Highlights one of the problems..

[The Second Horseman]

We're doing it for a fraction of that. Probably closer to $30 a year per person. That includes SAN storage, servers (with VMware ESX licenses), some share of our Novell licensing (it's GroupWise on SuSE Linux) a share of the backup cost and the minimal amount of staff time needed to keep it running. $25/month per user would be a massive chunk of our operating budget. Heck, I'd like to have $8.47 per user per month. Even adding things like anti-virus and spam filtering doesn't push us up to $8.47 per person per month.

Our unplanned outage time approaches 0%, and planned is hours per year (this year, there was a little more - we moved all the mail from a Netware 6.5 cluster setup to virtualized SuSE Linux running on VMware).

I'm not including the cost of Blackberry support. Partially because individual departments pay for them, rather than central IT.

I see numbers like this, and it makes me wonder if 1) companies are just doing dumb, wasteful things or 2) Forrester, Gartner, whoever figure out how to come to a pre-determined conclusion.

Re:Highlights one of the problems..

[hendridm]

I tested hosting one of my domains e-mail on Google Apps for awhile, and I got similar errors as the parent. It got so frustrating I just transferred the mail to another IMAP host.

It seems only to happen with accounts hosted by the free Google Apps (@mydomain.com). My Gmail account (@gmail.com) never experienced this problem. Still, it was a pretty lousy demonstration of their Apps services...