Google Buys iPhone Search App, Kills It 223
Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that Google has acquired a popular iPhone application called reMail that provides 'lightning fast' full-text search of your Gmail and IMAP e-mail accounts. The app downloads copies of all your e-mail which can then be searched with various Boolean options. reMail has only been in the application store for about six months — with a free version limited to one Gmail account and a premium version which can connect to multiple accounts. 'Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store,' writes company founder Gabor Cselle, who will be returning to Google as a Product Manager on the Gmail team. Google isn't saying what the fate of reMail might be. Some are suggesting reMail could be integrated into Gmail search or live on in some form as a part of Android, Google's mobile platform. Another possibility is that Google may have snapped up reMail just to kill it, not because reMail was a competitor to anything Google had, but because reMail made the iPhone better or the acquisition may have more to do with keeping good search technology away from the competition, as opposed to an attempt to undercut the iPhone. 'Perhaps Google is just planning to buy up all the iPhone developers, one at a time, until Android is the only game in town,' writes Bill Ray at the Register."
lulz (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like a case of Google in a Microsoft's clothing.
I use iGmail for full body searches (Score:4, Interesting)
Microgoogle? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ceased "not being evil" (Score:2, Interesting)
Now they are just the new microsoft or another corporate giant
they almost stop coding.... they just buy!
Remember google wave? blehg... google buzz? bleh...
Even Google Chrome is not what people imagined it would be..
Next big thing google will do (if they finally manage to pay enough) is buying facebook or twitter.
Re:Don't be Evil? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, this is a good case for why a developer would FOSS an application in the first place. Of course, if you're in "Please Google buy me out and make me rich beyond avarice" mode, then you wouldn't.
How about creating a semi FOSS license that remains closed source, and immediately becomes FOSS or Public Domain should the company ever fold, or the software itself becomes otherwise unavailable.
Kind of a poison pill of everlasting life. It would prevent applications from ever disappearing except by natural death (nobody wants it any longer).
Re:Totally idiotic conclusions (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not saying they're bad or evil and that they're big brother tracking you and "ooh, better wear your tinfoil hats" or anything. Simply saying their business is dependent on maintaining their lead in search technology and ad delivery technology and one of the best ways to do that is to data mine how/what people are searching.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Totally idiotic conclusions (Score:2, Interesting)
Effort to protect an illegal monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)
reMail provided a capability similar to Gmail's search that worked with IMAP accounts and mail providers other than Gmail
Since part of Gmail's competitive edge is good search technology, reMail was a substantial competitive threat.
Now by buying and killing them, their search capability is no longer available on the mobile platform. iPhone users will have to use gmail and Google's built-in search instead of a third-party IMAP provider in order to get a decent search experience.
Killing this competitor protects Google's monopoly on search, and on e-mail search in particular.
Re:Google saw a good thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
No kidding. In related news, did you know that Delta bought Northwest Airlines, and now they're killing it off? Seriously. They're removing all the NWA planes, and replacing them with Delta planes. And soon you won't even be able to buy tickets on NWA, you'll have to buy them on Delta. It's more evil than Stalin and Hitler combined!
Google bought the company (one guy and his app). The value for them is in the technology, not the reMail brand. They'll include the parts they like with the gmail service. The guy who created the app got a nice chunk of change from the purchase and a job at a company many would be excited to work for. This is capitalism in it's most basic form. A guy created something of value and was rewarded for it. If this qualifies as evil, you are in the wrong country.
Re:lulz (Score:4, Interesting)
GPLv2: I know my rights; I want my phone call!
The right to a phone call is a TV police show myth. There is no such right. It is custom, but not a right, and by no means universal. In some jurisdictions, you may not make phone calls. You have the right to have someone notified, to the extent that you can summon counsel. If the police merely notify the public defender, they have satisfied every legal obligation.
Isn't it obvious? (Score:1, Interesting)
When search is performed on the phone, google can't see what is searched for and either track it or monetize additional results.
Re:Profit (Score:1, Interesting)
Replace "GOOGLE" with "Cisco" and that was the resume of a guy I worked with. Seriously, he was a founder of four different startups they acquired and one company they owned 25% of.
Re:Fate? (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't embrace extend and extinguish though. There aren't very many good examples, but two more recent ones are:
HTML - Microsoft embraced it, then added extensions to it (Active X), and then after bundling it with the most popular OS on the planet it became a widely used standard. So much so that there are still apps out there that only run on IE (SAP client for example).
Java - Microsoft embraced Java (there was a time when IE had Java support built right in!), they added some extensions to it that only IE supported, and then Sun sued them. Still the fallout is that MS vowed to destroy them in the marketplace, and I'd say that Oracles purchase of Sun pretty much confirms they are on the right path still.
See the idea is to make it so that anyone who wants Java, or the Web has to use the most complete client - which is only available from MS. Once MS has you using their stuff - they then encourage people to use ActiveX - once everyone is doing that they then annouce that they are discontinuing support for Java or Javascript. That was the plan at least - the only thing that really shut this process down was Netscape opening up the source for their browser.
IBM was pretty good at this back in the day when they were a monopoly. They tended to do it more with communications protocols, cable plugs, disk formats than with software.
Google's purchase of this app, and removing it from the iPhone is actually more similar to something Apple does more frequently. Shake (while I know its discontinued bear with me) there was a time when it ran on Mac, Windows, Irix etc - after purchasing it they immediately discontinued support for Windows and SGI. What google did is a dick move, but it isn't embrace, extend and extinguish - and I'd defy you to find an example of google doing this.
Re:lulz (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you know if you request to have "so and so" notified has been completed? Should they not have to provide proof that such a task was completed? Doing so in any other way then letting you have a phone call, or making the call on speaker phone or some other way for you to hear said conversation, just screams potential corruption and abuse to me.
A word of advice - don't get too worked up drawing conclusions based on what someone said on Slashdot.
Re:How is this different from Apple? (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine a small town market place.
Scenario 1: The owner and landlord of the market invites all traders to come and sell goods in his market. However, he also owns a fish store. When a trader selling fish turns up, he refuses to let this trader into the market place. The other traders become worried that, someday, the owner and landlord of the market may stop them from trading on the market, too.
Scenario 2: A trader on the market sells a new type of hot dog. This hot dog is particularly tasty and quickly becomes popular. The owner and landlord of a different market notices this, buys the hot dog trader's business, and relocates it over to his market place.
These two scenarios are not the same. In scenario 1, the owner of the market has a conflict of interest between his landlord activities, and his other business activities. He is imposing a statist solution on the customers to his market, where competitors to his other business interests are refused access to the market. As a result, there is less competition, and customers lose out. In scenario 2, a company bought another company (which is okay), and then chose to sell the products of that company in its own market place. The actions of the market owner in this scenario have not reduced choice or imposed restrictions on the customers or traders of the market place, because the other food vendors are still free to make yummy hot dogs. Free and equal competition has been maintained, which is a good thing for capitalism and freedom (note that this would be different if the market owner were in a monopoly position - in which case, acquiring other companies and restricting their products to one particular market would reduce customer choice, as the customer of a monopolist has no realistic option of buying in an alternative market place).
Re:How is this different from Apple? (Score:2, Interesting)
... while killing the application in the interim for no apparent reason.
Even if it's the case that Google eventually integrates the feature into their code base, why shouldn't people have the option to continue to buy and use* the iPhone Search App if they so choose? This is no different, really, than Microsoft pushing people off Windows XP...except at least Microsoft has *some* software as a replacement.
Perhaps I'd be singing a different tune if reMail's features were already being made available through a Google and it was comparable to the reMail App, but we're simply not there yet. Microsoft routinely did the same thing throughout the 90s: buy (or attempt to buy) a product/company that was popular, drop sale of the product ASAP, eventually integrate an inferior version of the product in DOS/Windows (most often focusing more on extending Microsoft's reach than providing a great product), and watching as people who bought the old product eventually switch because it's rather pointless to hold on to a dead product that will never be updated again. If Microsoft (or Google) really cared about their customers, they would have continued development and sale of the product and integrated features based upon what users wanted (this could be determined in large part on the point at which almost all users stop buying the standalone product because the integrated version is good enough**).
*Yes, people can still continue to use the App if they already bought it, but tough luck to everyone who would have bought it who now has to wait and hope that Google eventually builds a replacement that works on their phone.
**Ironically enough, Microsoft seemed perfectly willing to do this with their own products (Windows Plus! and Outlook spring to mind). The simple fact that development teams were required to create a product worth buying above the minimal standard instead of being able to slub along with the knowledge that people didn't really have a choice in which option they'd like (since options were removed) seemed to spur some good competition. In general, if what Microsoft (or Google) offers as the standard is so good, then there shouldn't even be market for the supplemental software (and yes, sometimes people are idiots and this assumption fails), so continued development should have been halted when it no longer was profitable***.
***Obviously, this isn't simply by the standard of Microsoft/Google; for companies like Microsoft or Google, $100,000/year on a product might appear horrible, but it's pretty decent for one self-employed developer. But clearly, cutting off sale of the product right-off makes it impossible to even evaluate profitability.