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Google Businesses The Internet Technology

Google Terminates Six Services 195

Posted by Soulskill from the hasta-la-vista,-baby dept.
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."
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Google Terminates Six Services More

Google Terminates Six Services

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  • Hmm (Score:2)

    by pugdk ( 697845 )

    I've never heard of the other ones, but Google Notebook have come in handy plenty of times.

    Sad that Google feel the need to close down these services, I mean... how much man power could it really cost just to keep them running?

    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 18, 2009 @10:32AM (#26505801)
      You can still use it! See http://googlenotebookblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/stopping-development-on-google-notebook.html [blogspot.com] "Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we'll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don't fret, we'll continue to maintain service for those of you who've already signed up."

      • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)

        by htnmmo ( 1454573 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @12:53PM (#26506937) Homepage

        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.

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

          "Monetized"??? Monetization? Monetizing? To monetize? Monetizability?

          I presume that what you're saying is that Google isn't making a huge profit on those experiments.

  • I know about Evernote (from previous postings here), are there others which are worthwhile?

    A pity, as I had wanted to aggregate the exposure of personal info to Google....

    • UberNote [ubernote.com] isn't half bad. It doesn't maintain separate "notebooks" like gNotebook and Evernote do, but it does support tagging. It also does some cool importing from all kinds of services (including gNotebook), and you can send updates to it from AIM, an iPhone, and possibly others.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by darrylo ( 97569 )

      Well, I'm a big fan of Evernote, and so I strongly recommend that you check it out, While it's not identical to Google Notebook, the searching and offline capabilities are really nice. The Evernote folks are supposedly working on a Google Notebook to Evernote migration path.

      That said, if you don't like Evernote, I think the closest match to Google Notebook is Zoho Notebook, which is part of the Zoho online suite: http://notebook.zoho.com/ [zoho.com] . It even has a Firefox plugin, although I've never used it.

      Also,

  • Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by onion2k ( 203094 ) * on Sunday January 18, 2009 @10:33AM (#26505805) Homepage

    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.

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

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 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 jo

    • Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @10:51AM (#26505915)

      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.

      • Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @11:32AM (#26506163)
        "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."

        I would recommend against it, and I would be adamant about it. GMail's service is terrible; every few days, I get IMAP errors, usually along the lines of, "Cannot open mailbox," and occasionally a login failure (despite the fact that my username and password are stored and reused by my email client). School email can require the same level of reliability and availability as business email, at least at the college level: financial aid notices, graduate school applications, job applications, etc. Being unable to access your email can be a serious problem, and frankly, Google's service has not shown itself to be reliable enough for anything beyond irrelevant personal emails.

        There are free-as-in-beer email servers, even for very high volumes of mail, that any competent IT staff could maintain with minimal effort and better reliability than GMail. How much money do you think GMail would save? Is that amount of money actually worth the hassle of dealing with GMail?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by yashachan ( 1422227 )

          So far as I can tell, gmail is more reliable than my university's email.

          Then again, these are the same guys who destroyed one of my professor's laptops when trying to install Visual Studio Pro.

          • Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:4, Funny)

            by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @12:11PM (#26506461)
            To be fair, my university's IT staff is incompetent. They thought that it was a good idea to set up a firewall to block SSL access to POP3, leave open unencrypted POP3 access, and then actually ADVISE people who had problems with the VPN (which is another disaster born from their incompetence) to just use the unencrypted port. I reported this problem, then reported it again with an explanation of why it is a problem, and they have refused to fix it.

            In my original post, I should have emphasized that any competent IT staff could keep a mail server up and running.

            • Competence in IT staff would be nice. Then they might also realize that a mail system running on the Linux servers they already have is cheaper than running Exchange.

              My school's IT staff also has problems with secure email access. When we were on Lotus, we had to use the Lotus Notes client or the web-based deal to get a secure connection (if we used something like Thunderbird, our password was sent in a plain text file). They haven't fixed that with Exchange, either; the only secure email access is through

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mrbooze ( 49713 )

          There are free-as-in-beer email servers, even for very high volumes of mail, that any competent IT staff could maintain with minimal effort and better reliability than GMail. How much money do you think GMail would save? Is that amount of money actually worth the hassle of dealing with GMail?

          According to a Forester report, they estimate that it costs on average $25.18 per month per user to provide email services in-house, compared to $8.47 for Gmail.

          Interestingly, most people couldn't actually guess what the real cost of providing email services in-house was, many guessing $2-11 per user.

          The upshot of Forester's analysis was that up to around 15,000 users, it could be substantially cheaper to outsource email as an infrastructure service.

          Admittedly, there can be a lot more to the calculations th

          • Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by The Second Horseman ( 121958 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @02:08PM (#26507629)

            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: (Score:2)

              by fm6 ( 162816 )

              Even adding things like anti-virus and spam filtering doesn't push us up to $8.47 per person per month.

              Really? What about the time you spend maintaining all these systems? If your outage rates are really that low, then the people who do your infrastructure planning and administration are exceptionally good at their jobs. The time spent by such people is not free. I don't see personnel costs anyway in your calculations. And yet for most IT functions, they're the biggest single cost.

            • You probably haven't included the power, cooling, network, and floor space cost of wherever that gear lives. Both installation and on-going costs. Also, for the backup solution.

              Maybe you did, but the point is that the fully loaded cost would include a lot of hidden costs that you might take for granted.

        • I have 50 accounts for 20 or so users spread across 4 domains that use google apps for domains. Although google apps is not perfect, I have never once heard of the kind of issues you are describing. I would posit that the issue is your client.

          However, I agree that google apps is not appropriate for a large organization such as a school. It works for us because we are small enough that simply relying on individual email users to back up their gmail accounts once a week in case google should go bankrupt
          • "Although google apps is not perfect, I have never once heard of the kind of issues you are describing. I would posit that the issue is your client."

            The reason you are wrong to assume it is my client is that I use IMAP to check my work email and school email, and this problem ONLY happens with Google. I am not alone, either; in fact, it is documented that Google's IMAP implementation is poor:

            http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/10/imap [wired.com]

            As recently as last night I was receiving an er

            • That sounds like your client - I've never heard of this and have used google apps for most several mailboxes for quite a while.

              Occasionally it seems to have authentication problems, but hitting retry a couple of times fixes that. That's the extent of the problems.

        • Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:4, Informative)

          by RudeIota ( 1131331 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @02:01PM (#26507565) Homepage
          It always works for me (free gmail service) with IMAP. I've had a couple of issues where I had to "unlock" my account with their captcha [google.com] verification.

          Of course, when you PAY for the Google Apps service, 99.9% uptime is guaranteed and Gmail isn't 'beta' anymore...

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by hendridm ( 302246 )

            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...

        • So login with the web interface. I've _never_ had a problem with that, and I've been using it for around 6 years I believe and check in at the very least around 10 times a day. And if POP and IMAP don't always work (I've never had a problem with them either...but I don't usually use them), so what? You _do_ have a way to access it. Not all schools provide POP and IMAP as it is.

        • ...every few days, I get IMAP errors, usually along the lines of, "Cannot open mailbox," and occasionally a login failure (despite the fact that my username and password are stored and reused by my email client).

          Same here. Must say however, that the web interface works rather consistently. Wish they'd fix the IMAP problems though.

          • I'm curious: What OS do you and the parent poster use? At work, I have Win XP with Outlook and I get the IMAP errors throughout the day. At home, I run Ubuntu with Thunderbird and I don't get the IMAP errors (unless that's what is causing the strange, random closing of TB, but nothing in the logs about IMAP).

            • I'm running Kontact on Fedora 10, and Gmail is the only IMAP implementation to give me these problems. What bothers me the most is that there is no consistency in these errors -- sometimes people get them, sometimes they don't, sometimes there is an error every few hours, sometimes I go weeks with no errors.

              • I see what you're saying. I read the link you provided earlier to a Wired story and found some good links therein as well. It is possible, then, that this is the issue with my Thunderbird on Ubuntu (closing randomly). I've updated my settings in accordance with Google's instructions and suggestions (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78892&ctx=sibling#) to see if this produces any benefit. Most of the settings I already use and one I don't want to use (and is not critical here), but

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by stickyc ( 38756 )
        Google notebook seems redundant with Google Docs imo.

        I disagree. As a Google Notebook user, I found it very fast and easy to access. The cost (in clicks) of getting into a Google doc and organizing said doc after is much higher than with Notebook, plus there was an integrated FF plugin that made it very useful for clipping pages.

        While Google's statement is "no new development", I think odds are that it will be shuttered completely within 24 months as other notebook services' (Evernote, Zoho) feature sets

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by darjen ( 879890 )

          I've also been using google notebook because I'm tired of losing my bookmarks whenever I switch a computer or browser.

          However, if they do terminate it completely and take it offline, I'll just start using gmail and create a new label for all my bookmarks.

    • One interesting solution to this problem is Prophet - an open source distributed hosting solution.

      More info here: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/07/oscon-day-2-prophet-your-path.html [oreilly.com]

    • Re:Highlights one of the problems.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @11:18AM (#26506069)

      This isn't unique to 'services on the net'. Services -anywhere- are subject to this. Nothing has changed.

      What you really mean is 'software running on computers you don't control.'

      As as someone already pointed out, this is less of a problem for people who are paying for their service, rather than getting them for free.

      So what you really mean is 'software that you don't pay for, running on computers you don't control.'

      Why is it such a big surprise that it could go away?

      • As as someone already pointed out, this is less of a problem for people who are paying for their service, rather than getting them for free.

        I really don't think this lessens the problem that much though. Just because you are paying doesn't mean the service will last. What you really have to depend on is whether a lot of OTHERS are paying as well. They don't care if they have a paying customer or two if the service overall isn't profitable. They'll still shut it down.

        And even if it is a profitable service,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by winwar ( 114053 )

        "What you really mean is 'software running on computers you don't control.'"

        Of course, you can have very expensive software that you don't control on computers you do control that could be just as problematic.

        As others have said, it comes down to risk management. Unfortunately most companies often don't do it well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spisska ( 796395 )

      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.

      Sort of. It looks like these are all getting canned because they're not really used. This is a good thing. You don't want to be spending a lot of time and resources on products that are unused, half-baked, and for which there's no realistic plan. There is a lesson here for Redmond.

      It seems to

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by lukas84 ( 912874 )

        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?

      • Google's SLA is pretty pointless though. Maximum of 15 days free service at the end of your term that you have to ask for yourself? You might as well not even bother saying they have an SLA. Companies that give money back per X minutes of downtime or allow early term cancellations have a higher incentive to provide better service. (Although this is strictly my personal opinion since I'd rather not give money back.)

        But you're right that you could get far cheaper and more reliable service by outsourcing your

      • Unless I'm mistaken, you can run Google Apps (Mail, Docs, Calendar, etc) on your own hardware with your own storage if you want.

        Do you have a reference for this? I was looking for a self-hosted Gmail solution for a long time, and such a thing didn't exist as far as I knew. I've *love* to be able to have the GMail interface, but control the hosting and storage myself. I thought the only "appliance" google made was their search appliance...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by twilson94070 ( 233090 )

      I just exported the contents of my google notebook to google docs. That oughta do it! :P

    • No. It doesn't.
      At least the risk is about the same, as normal apps even GPL apps.

      The same thing happends with legacy apps, in many ways.
      You buy an app, you run it the company who produces the app goes out of business, your hardware upgrade make the software incompatible thus you will need to get a new application from someone else with a 50/50 shot of migrating your data. If if it was an open source app that stopped productions for most people who got this app to save money (sorry that is the real reason w

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      to me the issue is not he application, but the data. for instance long ago i used an app names eudora was used for mail, then it began to move to a new license model, and I moved away from it. This was not an issue because the data was on my machine, and it was in a known format. The same goes for my move to OO.org from MS.

      Certainly the use of such online applications should be used with the knowledge that that data may not be available. For video uploads, and one off notes, that is not a big deal. T

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 )

      It only highlights the problem of using FREE net services.

      If you pay for hosting ( or self host ) and host your own custom webapps, its not an issue.

    • The situation could be worse for desktop apps. When a company stops caring about producing a desktop application, they typically just stop providing updates. Sooner or later, a critical vulnerability starts gaining popularity.

      With the company disbanded, you may get no patch, and no warning. Then, even if you do get the warning, if the application is already integrated into the work environment, it might get labeled as an "acceptable risk". One of the HUGE advantages I see in cloud computing is that the

  • Obscure services (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 18, 2009 @10:46AM (#26505887)

    Much of the reason why Google became popular was because of its clean front page. Other search engines like Altavista made you load a pile of superfluous stuff when you just wanted to search. But this has come back to bite Google because unless you hunt them out, you'll never know most of Google's services even exist.

    • Re:Obscure services (Score:4, Funny)

      by CarpetShark ( 865376 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @11:41AM (#26506227)

      unless you hunt them out, you'll never know most of Google's services even exist.

      Indeed. And that's a big issue with some of their better services.

      For example, initially, I was really panicking as I read this headline, as I tend to rely on some google services a lot. Thankfully, re-reading showed that they're only cancelling "six" services, not their sex services.

    • Have you bothered to look on the upper left side of the Google front page, where those services are clearly linked?

      Really, it's all there. Has it gotten to the point where we need huge flashing animated banners with sound for people to find out about services on a website?

      Simple links are enough for me, and vastly preferred.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ccguy ( 1116865 )
      I'm sure google can _easily_ make sure you know about any service they think they can sell to you.

      Don't assume that just because you don't know about some specific google services they have a marketing problem.

  • Alternatives for Google Notebook? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GraphiteCube ( 1437703 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @11:01AM (#26505979)
    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.

    • delicious?

    • Actually Google Notebook is very handy, especially when you are not using your computer and want to jot down some notes.

      Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly are you using Google Notebook without using a computer? Unless Google just released a spiral bound version that I'm not aware of?

      • I have a few of those. Nice little paper notebooks embossed with the Google logo, given away as promotional items. You can use them anywhere, no computer needed!

        But I believe that GraphiteCube was talking about when you're not using your own computer. That is, you're using someone else's, or a public terminal or something. But personally, I'd just send email to myself in that case. Or use my paper Google notebook. :-)

    • Re:Alternatives for Google Notebook? (Score:5, Informative)

      by darrylo ( 97569 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @11:56AM (#26506337)

      Actually Google Notebook is very handy, especially when you are not using your computer and want to jot down some notes.

      If you have an iPhone, Evernote has an app that accesses your online Evernote database.

      I used to use Google notebook, which is still nice, but I've since switched to Evernote. I like Evernote because:

      • Searching is much faster.
      • Works offline.
      • Can sync offline databases between multiple PCs (and Macs!).
      • I can access the same database from any web browser (the data is mirrored on Evernote's servers, as well as your PCs and Macs).
      • Works on the iPhone (but data is stored on Evernote's servers, and not on the iPhone, unless you individually marks notes on the iPhone).
      • It's free for light to moderate usage (you get roughly 40MB of notes per month, free).
      • Because searching is fast, I'm now using it for bookmarks. I've migrated all of my del.icio.us bookmarks into it (along with descriptive web page fragments).
  • I enjoy this product and yeah I can still use it but why bother when it'll never improve and may disappear for me in the near future too?

    Google's biggest problem is they have something like Notebook that has real potential but they put zero effort into it and then it's no surprise it's not very popular.

    They should focus on search but they should start trying to build up more of a foothold in other areas because there's no guarantee they'll be the top dog forever.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )

      If it took no effort, you should write one yourself and capitalize on it.

      • Maybe I should.

        That said my point wasn't that it took no effort to create but creating something and them more or less letting it sit there to rot isn't a smart thing to do.

        Google doesn't promote some of its other services as much as it should. For instance what's the point of buying Orkut and then not promoting it? Unless the whole point was to kill it off for Blogger.

        • Re:Lame (Score:4, Informative)

          by flooey ( 695860 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @11:47AM (#26506269)

          Google doesn't promote some of its other services as much as it should. For instance what's the point of buying Orkut and then not promoting it? Unless the whole point was to kill it off for Blogger.

          Are you thinking of some other product? Orkut has been a Google service since the beginning, and is one of the top social networks in the world (though not in the United States).

  • Google needs to get some of their more POTENTIALLY profit making projects out of Beta or Pre-Beta stage. Like Grand Central. Infinitely useful but it has no adds, no pay anything, and has been in closed Beta since they bought it. I love the service, so why is google not turning it PLUS a number of other project that generate 0 revenue... into profit streams.

    Please note I am not saying turn it into a RAPE profit center, but like the way Googles Search or Gmail works... it could Generate SOMETHING to suppor

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by B5_geek ( 638928 )

      I have a couple of questions about Grand Central.

      The whole point is so that you don't have to tell everybody when your phone number changes and/or when you add new phone numbers to your collection (i.e. cell phone, pager, office, home, summer home, etc..) How does it handle if you travel a lot?

      e.g. If I setup a Michigan phone number (as my Grand Central number), and add a Florida cell phone; will I be charged long-distance fees to have my calls forwarded?

      Does it forward calls at all? or is it just a 'voice

      • As a GC user, let me take a stab at it.

        Calls to my GC number get forwarded to whatever combination of work, home, and cell numbers I want, based on the calling number (or group I've placed it in). You can designate up to 6 numbers to ring, but each has to have one of those 3 labels, or Gizmo. You can have specific calling numbers ring directly to voicemail or get a "not in service" message.

        I can also temporarily add another number to have calls forwarded to. There's no charge for long-distance forwarding

  • I think that the honeymoon is finally over. Google too, will now slowly leave behind the free lunch culture to the inevitable areas of concern --> bottom line and market valuation. The question remains as to whether it will be able to continue with the innovative and creative work culture despite financial concerns.

  • SaaS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Sunday January 18, 2009 @12:36PM (#26506755) Homepage Journal

    This is why Software as a Service is never a good idea. You can have a ton of data stored on that service and it can be discontinued at any time. This is why when I do use Google Docs, I have the data backed up on our own site, and this is also why I won't use Microsoft Live! alternatives to Office.

    It is designed to create vendor lock-in. I do not trust the likes of Microsoft to provide a data export option should they decide the service is not working. Thankfully Google has at least up to now been honorable in providing the means to retrieve data even when products have ceased, and provided PLENTY of notice (we knew what, two years ago that Google Video was going to die?) when discontinuation of hosted services were planned.

    In light of this. F/OSS and "shared source" solutions you host yourself (or at least have FULL access to not only the data but also the code) is the best solution, and even proprietary/closed-source shrinkwrap software where you have both the software and the data in-house are the best solutions. Even closed-source software with craptivation, er, activation and per-use license verification schemes are vastly superior because should the vendor die, cracking the checks to continue your right of first sale to use the product can still be exercised in the very worst cases.

    In this case users are fortunate it's Google services because as stated above Google provides plenty of notice and the means to retrieve data - and in the case of some tools have even have open source so you can continue use of the service in your own hosted environment. Don't expect that to be the case with other SaaS solutions when they are terminated.

  • It's too bad that GNotebook is stopping development. I've seen the usual recommendations of Evernote as a replacement, but I don't want that. I want something complete web-based, and I'm on an Ubuntu desktop so as far as I know the Evernote desktop client won't work. I've heard that the web-based Evernote doesn't have as many features or something.

    What I think I really want is something that I can host myself. If I'm depending on a 3rd party to continue it's support, but they fall through, I'm stuck.

  • Well, they were beta anyway so...

  • This will be good for competitors. Take Google Catalog Search, for instance. When it first came out I thought it was a great idea. Then I went to look at it again last year, and some catalogs were more than 4 years old, when I had current ones sitting on my shelf.

    But who's going to launch a competing service when Google could easily get back to doing a good job? By closing down the projects, competitors will stand a chance of flourishing/getting funded, etc.

    So, good for Google for letting some of their

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