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Google To Shutter Knol, Wave, Gears 218
An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today on its official blog the impending closure of a number of its less successful services. In addition to retiring minor features like Bookmarks List and Friend Connect, Google has outlined a plan to close down Wave. The experimental communication medium will go read-only on January 31, and on April 30 they will shut it down completely. Also on April 30, Google will be changing Knol so that individual knols are not viewable, though users will still be able to download and export them until October 1, at which point they'll disappear entirely. Google Gears is also getting the axe, as is Search Timeline and the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative."
They cancel products left and right (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:5, Insightful)
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The ones that aren't cancelled are the popular ones, and these often have regular price increases as they get more popular.
Gmail and search are exceptions, since they probably make enough money from them already.
Not that I expect free stuff from Google, they're a business and have to cover costs/make a profit etc.
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You know there are ads in the regular free gmail account?
I dunno if they make truckloads of money through this, but it has to count for something...
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Wave was amazing.
And no one uses them because in early beta they are closed down.
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:4, Insightful)
Wave was a cool idea that desperately needed a desktop client and more partners. It needed an Open Rich Mail Alliance a-la Android to sell servers, integrate with for-pay and for-free services, and actually use the protocol for real work.
As long as you had to go to the Google website to read a Wave it suffered from the perception that it was a Google service and was only useful in that way.
(On the other hand you could go totally conspiracy-minded and say that Wave was intended to fail, and Google was attempting to use it as a pilot plant for various Google+ features, at a time when the Diaspora was all the rage and people were casting about for open source alternatives to Facebook.)
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:5, Insightful)
Wave was amazing.
And no one uses them because in early beta they are closed down.
I tried Wave and it didn't make any damn sense so I didn't use it any more.
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:5, Funny)
How did it not make sense?
Fill text boxes with text, that is about it.
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How did it not make sense? Fill text boxes with text, that is about it.
That's pretty much all I could think of, too.
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Wave was amazing. And no one uses them because in early beta they are closed down.
I tried Wave and it didn't make any damn sense so I didn't use it any more.
Wave is good for some collaboration stuff. We loved it for online char-sheet work, for instance, some types of editing. I think Wave was awesome, if Niche, in many respects. I don't think Google spent enough time taking a truly awesome technology and researching/marketing use cases.
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We wrote a robot that took our brainstorming and put it into a formatted document.
This allowed us to share not only our idea, ut how we got to the conlcusions
This had 3 effects:
1) Better documentation chain.
2) People saw How we came to a conclusion. This topped a lot of 'did you think of this' conversation
3) It allowed people to see our session afterwords and propose other lines of thought we missed.
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There's hints that they rolled some of the core technologies of Wave into Google Docs to enable document collaboration.
They also donated Wave to Apache.
I had great hopes for it as a collaboration application - never mind the social aspects. I'd really like to sit down with it and make something worthwhile, but I think it's beyond the limits of my spare time. Specifically, I think it would be really, really, great for medical records, as long as the access control, encryption, etc, can be sorted out. Especia
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Indeed, the idea behind Google Wave was one with future -- if only people had understood what it really was. Having an assignment for school/university, and it's a group work. You could use Google Wave to work on the same document at the same time, see changes real time, and have a finished work without having to send a file to anybody. All you'd have to do then is more or less copy-paste it to a word processor (and fix possible inconsistencies), but that's just trivial.
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:4, Informative)
I agree completely.
We had a production issue one day, and the team was spread all over the country at the time. We decided Wave would be perfect for collaboration. Signing up was easy enough, but every conversation got threaded in weird ways, we couldn't figure out how to tell what had been read or not. It was a total mess. After an hour or so we gave up and just used a chat room.
I'm not saying it wouldn't have worked for us, but we could not figure it out.
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:4, Informative)
At least Google did the right thing with Wave and made it open source:
http://www.waveprotocol.org/wave-in-a-box
Still, I'll miss the old girl. At least I have hopes that eventually I'll have a company-wide Wave server to replace Wikis (which have horrible access control) and email (which is just horrible).
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:5, Interesting)
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It was slow because they decided to implement it in javascript and didnt want to release a native client.
Its sad to say, but if Microsoft had released the exact same thing, people would have been all over it because support would have been baked into Outlook 2012, it would have integrated with AD, and it would have been ready to install in Windows server 2008 in about 2 hours.
Google (as is their wont) linked to a page on how to download and install the prereqs, how to compile wave, and how to get it going o
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But 90% of it was significantly different and for different things.
Welcome to the cloud! (Score:5, Insightful)
They cancel them because no one really uses them.
For sufficiently imprecise definition of "no one". What you means is no one you personally care about.
Welcome to the cloud, where abandonware is truly dead and nostalgia is a thing of the past. This is what happens when you hand the keys to the kingdom to a service provider with their own motivations and that do not care about you.
And thanks for re-affirming the lesson Google. I now try to use Google for nothing except search and perhaps Google Earth on rare occassions. They've even managed to turn me off Picasa with glaring bugs like losing face data you spend hours entering.
life cycle of a cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:life cycle of a cloud (Score:4, Funny)
Re:life cycle of a cloud (Score:5, Informative)
Funny, but no, OP is correct. Clouds are condensed water droplets: liquid. Gaseous water is invisible.
Re:Welcome to the cloud! (Score:5, Insightful)
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
I will credit Google with letting people retrieve their data, but its usefulness is greatly reduced without the applications it was designed for.
They call it the cloud because people have gotten wise to being offered low prices on the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Well said.
Re:Welcome to the cloud! (Score:5, Interesting)
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
Yep yep.
Remember when knol was first introduced? It was supposed to be a "verified wikipedia", written by experts. Those experts (you, me, anyone) were to spend a lot of time, effort, and domain knowledge in writing high-quality articles... and in return we would receive a per-click royalty. This would incentivize the creation of actionable content that would something something revolutionize something synergy something leverage.
I remember thinking through the subjects for which I am credible authority, and considering whether to produce some knols in order to develop a bit of side income. I very seriously considered it... and judging from some of the knols I've seen, lots of other people went all the way.
Now we see how it all ends up. Just like the DRM game ended up. "Oh, sorry users, but this quarter we have decided that the project isn't profitable. Or we just hired a new VP and he's shaking things up. Or whatever. We're closing it down, so f*** you and your investment, you're just an externality."
I will now NEVER, EVER contribute content to a for-profit enterprise. Be it amazon reviews or knols or sidebar markups or whatever, that's it, I'm done.
Re:Welcome to the cloud! (Score:5, Informative)
You could also run Wave yourself: Google has made it Open Source and it's now an Apache project: https://incubator.apache.org/wave/index.html [apache.org]
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Is this the whole Wave with the web interface, because from the first glance it appears to be just the protocol and the APIs? Also, would this include federation between servers, because if I recall correctly it was never enabled in the Google Wave servers, so I suppose it's not ready either.
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Is this the whole Wave with the web interface
Why would you want that? While it was pretty enough, it was horribly hard to use (and harder still to use well).
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Why would you want that? While it was pretty enough, it was horribly hard to use (and harder still to use well).
Still better than having to write your own client from scratch.
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Well, they say:
The main sub project of Apache Wave is "Wave in a Box", a stand alone wave server and rich web client that can serve as a Wave reference implementation.
I haven't checked the source, though.
Re:Welcome to the cloud! (Score:4, Interesting)
They cancel them because no one really uses them.
For sufficiently imprecise definition of "no one". What you means is no one you personally care about.
Scary thing is, a community of 10,000 people could use and love a service, come to depend on it as part of their lives, but 20,000 just isn't enough eyeballs to pay the bills with advertising. Maybe Google should open an option for conversion of dying services to subscription basis instead of (addition to?) advertising?
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Okay, so I only know of two that meet that criteria... gotcha.
Re:Welcome to the cloud! (Score:4, Insightful)
Email will probably be dead in the common eyes by 2016 or so.
While I'd like that to happen, I seriously doubt it. For this to happen, we would need a viable and better alternative. AFAIK there are none in sight. At all.
I would need to be better, and it would need to be as universal. Apart from phone - which predates email - I don't know of any way to contact virtually anyone on the planet for free. And I don't know of any alternative to the email that would be 4 years away from there.
It *could* happen. I'd like it to happen, although my liking would depend on which solution comes in replacement to the email. But I believe it's not going to happen, at least not that fast.
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Change focus? I wasn't aware they had one.
They seem to flit around like a butterfly, dabbling in this, tinkering with that, but never actually following through and finishing anything.
Of the three things mentioned the only one I'd even heard of was Gears.
Cancellation is NOT an issue with The Cloud. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Re:Cancellation is NOT an issue with The Cloud. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
But be careful - for it to all work, you have to remember to take ownership and set up an action plan that shifts some paradigms and enables group synergies - a lot of managers forget that part.
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Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:5, Insightful)
I cannot take them seriously anymore. Anyone to use them for business would be insane.
Because all companies should support all products forever, even if no one uses them? What company does that?
I mean, look at Itanium, at this point the only way to keep Itanium alive would be to *pay* Intel to keep making them. Oh wait.... [slashdot.org]
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Apparently, people find the idea of one company paying another for a product to be shocking.
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http://www.techfocusmedia.net/archives/articles/20110309-itanium/?printView=true [techfocusmedia.net]
Re:They cancel products left and right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. I had to have this conversation several times. Google just sent our CEO a notice that Google Health was also going to be pulled. His comment, "That's crazy. I believed all of their bullshit about how great it would be. What else can't I use? What else do we have on Google?" He meant what products or apps that we use or develop depend on google services other than google core. Too many.
Google, at least give us a couple of years notice. Bing it is! not
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For Wave, you can download your data and the Wave source code (Google has released it as free software) and run your own server.
That's hardly "the whole product will be gone", IMHO.
Of course YMMV with other services.
Standard disclaimers: I speak only for myself and not for my employer or anyone else. IANAL. IANARE.
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"No sane business would build their future on such ground."
Fortunately, there aren't very many of those at all.
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"Because all companies should support all products forever, even if no one uses them? What company does that?"
If users got source-code and the right to modify/update their software no one would have to rely on companies in the first place. The whole bit about companies being able to own in perpetuity software they no longer support or sell but their users still use is bullshit. Users need rights to get source-code, etc. They have every right to modify/update their own software.
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I cannot take them seriously anymore. Anyone to use them for business would be insane.
Yes right because Microsoft would never deprecate DCOM, Silverlight or VB6
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Yes and some of the products they've been cancelling they haven't even been cancelling, just replacing with a newer product.
Try minus the condescension (Score:4, Insightful)
"I will not use other successfully products by company X because they cancel support for products that I don't use and others don't either." Intelligent.
Let me fix that for you. "I refuse to become reliant for basic service on a vendor that clearly has their own agenda and will happily cancel those services without regard to what I want or need".
You can make anything sound unintelligent with careful paraphrasing to reductio ad absurdum, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it actually is unintelligent.
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I hate to break it to you, but every vendor has its own agenda.
Re:Try minus the condescension (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate to break it to you, but every vendor has its own agenda.
That's my freaking point, isn't it. Cloud means they get to pull the rug from under you. Most moderate to large companies and savvy individuals shoudl keep their own data in their own hands and keep at least binaries of what they want to run out of the control of the vendor. Yes it is more work and more money. Yes you can get it wrong so you have to make an effort not to. But software as a service and your apps and data on the cloud is a cancer to your ability to do anything with your own data.
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When they cancel GMail arbitrarily, let me know. Until then, my argument remains valid.
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There's a huge difference in using something and becoming reliant on something. Early adopters of Gmail (like me) didn't suddenly move all operations to Gmail -- we used it on the side, for occasional personal correspondence, and we maintained our well-known aliases until Gmail quickly became the dominating provider. Its permanent status became apparent when the IT community universally sided with Gmail rather than Hotmail (by 2005-2006).
Hotmail's still around in a big way in my circle of non-techy friends. In fact my wife's primary email is still Hotmail.
In any case you have eventually moved all your correspondence onto GMail. If they started charging for it or shut it down today, or in 5 years time, there would be pain. And that is with a realtively easy to replace service. (Let's face it the biggest pain is distributing your email address without leaving someone out - email is a commodity).
Finally who's to say what a basic service is?
A core product. One the average person can name. Search. Mail. Maps. Documents. YouTube. Google+. That's it. Sadly.
Then your argument must be that apart from those
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Opera Mail is just a client. GMail is both a client and server.
I just use the server part through IMAP. Coupled with my own domain, I could move in a couple of hours if I needed to. Commodity services ftw.
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Not quite. Operamail is also a service, and has been for over a decade. I've long used it, even as a paying subscriber, but at some point they moved to some kind of hosted platform which pretty much took all the awesome out of it. That's the point where I switched to Gmail. In the mean time, I've set up Zimbra on my own server, so I'm no longer dependent on Google, either.
Google anounces the closing of Search (Score:5, Funny)
However you will still be able to see ads for words you're searching for.
They failed because... (Score:5, Insightful)
...oddly enough, Google absolutely FAIL at marketing.
I'm not even kidding.
How the hell they became the biggest damn advertiser on the web I will never know, they are hopeless at doing anything right.
You want to know who they remind me of? Remember Malcolm In The Middle? Google is Malcolm!
Awkward, obtuse, but somehow stupidly intelligent. Stupidly intelligent is probably the best way to describe Google.
Seriously, why cancel Gears? Gears was USEFUL. It never needed that much attention as it was, and it was supposed to fill in for things that weren't quite ready in the HTML5 spec.
They say they ditched it because "it is no longer needed" or some nonsense. Funny, I can't remember when the ability to be able to drag and drop files in to web apps was added, last I checked, the File API is still in planning even now.
Gotta love that brilliant Offline Gmail we don't have anymore. Whats that, you released an extension for it? BRILLIANT IDEA, SOMETHING ELSE THAT ISN'T STANDARD AND WILL LIKELY HAVE TO BE KEPT UP TO DATE TOO, JUST LIKE GEARS.
Absolute lunacy.
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Canceling gears is to be expected, but doing so before there was support for the replacement in either of the other top three browsers is silly. That being said, I don't use the functionality as I prefer to use a proper mail client.
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Seriously, why cancel Gears? Gears was USEFUL...
Google's decisions are not based on how useful an application is to anyone. Google is a company. If Gears or any future application does not make the company enough money then it will be axed.
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Yes, what they have now makes money. But their new products keep failing to. That isn't a winning long term strategy.
Their failures are largely because they don't build out and commit to platforms. Every time they have a high profile product or service that gets launched too early, fails to grow, doesn't get supported, and then gets cancelled, they lose credibility with developers. Why be an early adopter for a new Google platform if they aren't going to put some time into making it work and grow? Why
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Funny, I can't remember when the ability to be able to drag and drop files in to web apps was added
It seems to be fairly common [google.com], being used by Gmail since April 2010 [webmonkey.com], and is in the Mozilla docs [mozilla.org].
"The Cloud" in action (Score:3)
Hope you've got an easy way to get all your data back and can unhook all your applications cleanly.
Google are cutting costs in advance of the onrushing double dip. Jobs will be next.
This is what'll happen to any "cloud" service which isn't making money. Utility computing, you don't pay enough you get cut off. Live with it.
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Better to fail at marketing that produce crappy products though. Look at Bing. It is the default search engine and home page for every Windows PC, yet they still can't compete with Google.
Health (Score:3)
Google Health too.
Prognosis? (Score:5, Funny)
Google Health too.
So you're saying the prognosis for Google Health is not good?
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I concur
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Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a web developer!
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Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a web developer!
It's the same thing - you know how to deal with a disorganized mess of badly designed loosely connected parts!
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So you're saying the prognosis for Google Health is not good?
It's dead, Jim.
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So you're saying the prognosis for Google Health is not good?
It's worse than that, it's dead, Jim.
Stating the Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
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Umm, Wave got canned pretty damn fast, they just didn't completely pull the plug until recently.
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Re:Stating the Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with redefining yourself is, if you can do it once, then you can do it again. Not an argument that inspires confidence in the kind of customers who are worried about fickleness.
OTOH, if Wave is the example, you can trust Google to make sure that you can get your data out of it, and to make the code available so you can host it yourself or find another place to host it for you if you need to.
Let's see what this means. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Gears - Holy crap! That thing is still alive?
Google Search Timeline - I'm confused. What does Trends show us then?
Re<C - They admit they're not the best suited for the job. So they publish their results and continue using renewable energy.
Google Friend Connect - Dunno what that is, but seems kinda outa place now that Google+ (showing no signs of premature death) is here.
Knol - This one is a bit sad. But then they worked with others to start Annotum [wordpress.com].
Bookmark Lists - Meh.. With sharing links on fb and Google+ whenever we spot something interesting, who'll bother with this?
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Trends is just that, recent trends in what people search for.
Timeline is chronological sort of results, allows you to see the rise and fall of a term like jabberwocky, etc.
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Knol - This one is a bit sad. But then they worked with others to start Annotum.
Seriously, I never found Knol to be useful, and actually have forgotten about it since it launched years ago. What was it ever used for?
Summary for those who don't want to read (Score:2)
Google Bookmarks Lists—Date was December 19, 2011. All your bookmarks are belong to recycle bin.
Google Friend Connect— On March 1, 2012 you will face the fact that you have no friends.
Google Gears—To be jammed December 1, 2011
Google Search Timeline—Now history!
Google Wave—Wave goodbye on January 31, 2012
Knol—Stop seeking the Oracle on April 30, 2012
Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (REC)—Redirecting enviro-bullshit, capt'n.
Fuck google, give me my timeline (Score:2)
It's not even a seprate product, just a useful interface to search (they've since hidden away).
Very useful to explore news coverage, prevalence of terminology, etc.
Gears' and Wave are non-news, previously announced... indeed Gears has been death row almost a year now
PV RE cheaper than coal soon by GE & others? (Score:2)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/solar-may-be-cheaper-than-fossil-power-in-five-years-ge-says.html [bloomberg.com]
Is that why Google has stopped work on the solar power tower design with heliostats?
Page (Score:2)
Google has been infiltrated. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Google's stock peaked in 2007. Google is making money, but it's keeping all of it. They don't pay a dividend. Investors would like to see some return on their investment.
Google still has the big problem that they only have one revenue source, ads. Nothing else they've tried makes much money. 96% is still from ads. Google's flings with telephony and social networking aren't contributing significant revenue. Being #1 in giving stuff away isn't paying off as well as expected.
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Well, Larry Page recently became CEO at Google, which is not a bean counter. Probably they are acting like Steve Jobs.
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I suspect this is more to do with focus than bean counting. Though I agree Google is foundering.
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Google's eventual decline has begun sooner than expected.
For me it already started when they stopped being the cool company to work at about a year ago. That's Facebook now apparently [cnn.com].
Beta (Score:2)
"From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will n" (Score:3)
What the fuck Google? I like Google as a company, I really do, but this is a shit move however you look at it. They don't have to support any more updates to Knol, but why the hell not jsut host the pages as static content? That wouldn't break the bank and would definitely generate some good will. Or at least, stem a fuckton of ill-will.
A cloud company... (Score:4, Insightful)
That keeps launching and killing things. And mismanaging things.
Wave was a brilliant collaboration tool that was under developed and killed too early.
Why would I put anything inside someone's cloud when every month they announce new closures, and terminations. There was a time where Google released stuff, and people were allowed to use that 'stuff' and the google machine paid for it, and you knew where you stood. The company is now operating in an opposite direction. You now don't know if they launch something, wether you can invest time in it. You don't know if it will stay up or be yanked.
And - if you took time and for example liked Wave - they renaged on their promises, and not only announced its end - buit have not done what they said they would do. They have not made good on their public statements.
Anyone who deals with cloud based companies that:-
1. Breach trusts and don't commit fullt to what they state they will do
And
2. End services and support just because it suits them, irrespective of what it may cost you.
Is a cloud company to be wary of. This is not the behaviour of early google, and its showing.
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Still use it nearly every day. I was hoping they would open it up and my friends and I could host it on our own server
I have some good news [apache.org] - although they don't seem to actually have a really ready yet.
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If you started a company who's success was dependent on a third party with no contractual obligation giving away something for free, you deserve to fail. For sheer stupidity of not having a backup plan, if nothing else.
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Pretty easily. Just more expensive.
But here they weren't even relying on already released open source. They were relying on a company releasing source to a product that hadn't yet been released. That's idiotic, especially without a plan for what to do if the company decides not to go through with it.