Google Kills More Services, Open Sources Sky Map 121
alphadogg writes "Google is continuing to weed out its services and on Friday announced it will shut down Picnik, Google Message Continuity and Needlebase and make changes to some other services. Google acquired Seattle-based Picnik in 2010, saying it would integrate the photo editing service with its own Picasa. 'We're retiring the service on April 19, 2012, so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products,' Dave Girouard, vice president of product management for Google, wrote in a blog post Friday."
A positive change to come out of this is that Google is open-sourcing Sky Map, and will be collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University to continue development.
Cloud Services vs. Desktop Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cloud Services vs. Desktop Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Cloud services aren't the problem. Free cloud services where you are hoping that someone else picks up the tab for paying for development, maintenance and infrastructure are the problem. Granted, desktop apps are a better long-term investment than cloud services if you're wondering about the viability of the company that you are investing in. But if there's an actual business model in place (i.e., one that involves payment and not just "eyeballs"), cloud services offer quite a few advantages over desktop apps. It's up to you to decide whether you'll trade not having to maintain the software and being able to access it from anywhere with the knowledge that the software will stick around for as long as you have the installation file (DRM throwing another wrinkle in here as well).
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Something doesn't have to be free to be unprofitable (although bailouts somewhat mitigate that if you're large enough, heh).
Also, advertising is the business model for much of the web. Try taking away all the sites you use which rely on advertising to survive.
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And I would be very interested to see Word Perfect 1.0 run on any modern hardware without some very very serious hack rages going on.
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And I would be very interested to see Word Perfect 1.0 run on any modern hardware without some very very serious hack rages going on.
I don't think there WAS a 1.0 in WordPerfect's versioning. The initial release was on Data General minicomputers and had no version number, but would most likely still run comfortably on one of the SIMH multi-system emulators.
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I'm not sure about WordPerfect, but VisiCalc for DOS, which I ran on my 8086 PC and was originally released in 1979, still works in DOSBox. In fact, I can still open spreadsheets that I created in the '90s on my Psion Series 3 by running a Psion Series 3A emulator in DOSBox.
Perhaps more interestingly, I have a lot of files lying around from the '90s that I've just copied from one machine to another without really paying attention to what they were. When I went from a 60MB hard disk to a 1GB one, there
Re:Cloud Services vs. Desktop Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cloud Services vs. Desktop Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me expand that to say that anytime you are building something that ultimately relies on a 3rd party for integral, non-easily-replicatable components, you're asking for trouble
I think you're stretching that a bit. The vast majority of the world's IT does exactly this. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Hitachi, EMC, Cisco, etc. all provide "integral, non-easily-reproducable" components.
The difference is that if you buy physical hardware and own the software (often with a source code escrow agreement), you can control the pace of getting off something, whereas in the cloud, you cannot.
PHP and LAMP/LAPP (Score:1)
That's why I choose PHP on the LAPP stack (postgres vs mysql). I have the entire source code for my stuff and they're all permissively licensed (much more lenient than GPL) so the odds of them ever being abandoned are very remote.
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Let me expand that to say that anytime you are building something that ultimately relies on a 3rd party for integral, non-easily-replicatable components, you're asking for trouble.
Yet many businesses work exactly that way. They're trading off an increase in risk (e.g., from a jerkwad supplier) for an immediate reduction in costs from not having to have so much expertise in-house. That can turn make a small business profitable enough to support an owner and a few staff, at least for a while, and is the very bedrock of the free market.
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But you always have to check every angle and make some tradeoffs. Basically, thats what libraries are for!
Example: We developed many Eclipse plug-ins and used 3rd party plug-ins/metamodels
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I don't think that whether you pay or not matters that much.
Cloud services are always paid for, whether by advertising, collection of data, or actual payment by the user. They all have a business model of some sort. It's not the sort of thing you can run from a box in your closet because you feel like it, and eat the cost because it's not a big deal to you.
So even if you pay, the exact same thing happen. So you pay $10 per month or whatever. Big deal, you're still insignificant in comparison to what's neede
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Cloud services aren't the problem. Free cloud services where you are hoping that someone else picks up the tab for paying for development, maintenance and infrastructure are the problem.
Actually, free cloud services where you are hoping that someone else picks up the tab for development aren't the problem. It's not having a plan to keep things running when you need to move away from *any* product or service you depend upon.
Take Amazon's S3 service. It's not likely to go away, but it's quite possible that one day you'll decide S3 doesn't meet your needs any longer. Maybe the price for your usage tier went up, or maybe another vendor has a more attractive service. *Even if you don't expect
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That's not the problem either. The problem is dependency on any product of service (on-premise or remote, cloud or not, developed in-house or custom by a third party or COTS) for which your assurances of reliability (whether contractual, or based on your own internal QC processes, or whatever) is not sufficient given the cr
Re:Cloud Services vs. Desktop Apps (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's a shame that you're 100% locked in to their free service, there is no warning, and you can't get your data out, or use any alternatives.
Oh, wait...
Re:Cloud Services vs. Desktop Apps (Score:5, Interesting)
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Usually there really isn't any good warning ahead in time.
... when it isn't google.
With Google it's just a few months.
Riiiight...
Not all of Google's services are free either, and since they most often don't release the source code, you are basically locked to their services.
OK - name one of google's services that they have canceled in a way that screwed the users. Where they lost their data or could not get it out in a very meaningful way.
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so have to agree with this assessment.
Google is never about killing off services. NEVER.
Google is about replacing aging or failing services with new or popular services.
GMC customers are never going to lose data if they pay attention and migrate to google apps or elsewhere before the clock runs out.
Google gives you very long warnings. And multiple times.
If you aren't paying attention, you're not doing your job and it's your fault.
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"Monitoring conversations, including those that take place with social media, is part of our daily routine; our products can be used as early warning systems, helping clients with rapid response and crisis management. "
http://waggeneredstrom.com/about/approach
Team members include:
bonch
DCTech
ge7
zget
cgeys
*x**y*y**x*
InsightIn140Bytes
SharkLaser
HankMoody (2554362
What are alternatives to (Score:2)
Reader, Gmail?
(I mean we know they are going to close them eventually as well, right?)
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Reader
... any news aggregator?
http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators [newsonfeeds.com]
Gmail?
You're kidding, right? Any mail provider... I don't know what to say.
* I hosted my own until a few years ago
* yahoo
* hotmail
* my isp
* everyone and their brother
I mean we know they are going to close them eventually as well, right?
I don't get it. Why are you just spreading FUD? OK, maybe you don't like google. But you can't come up with a single service that they have shut down and really inconvenienced their users. And you're naming gmail just looks dumb - they make money off that. And while it would no
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The cloud is a joke generally, but trust "them" to give you your backups 99.99999% of the time, and that's really useful.
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Microsoft is constantly trying to move Office into the cloud, so what's the difference?
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Most times you can continue using existing software, even without support, for an indefinite period until something breaks. There is software written over a decade ago that still works fine without any updates since. If a cloud service goes offline, though, you have no real choice most of the time.
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Because you still have the software as oppossed to a 404 page....
Many bussiness operate well on old software, not because they cannnot afford to change, because the 15 year old ERP system does what they need it to do and there is no reason to. Google expects bussiness to become their beta testers and everyone is a market test case.
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How is Cloud different from other software, which can also be killed, unless of course, it is open source. But even with open source, it is more convenient if the company continues to maintain and support it.
If desktop software gets killed you still have your copy to use.
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And Google is trying to make sure that's possible. [dataliberation.org]
Re:Cloud Services vs. Desktop Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
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You spend the required money and/or resources to migrate to a new service to support that business process, and in the process end up with better software and/or process than you previously had. No software can or should exist as-is in perpetuity; change and progress is good for all of us.
Re:Cloud Services vs. Desktop Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, as seems far more likely the case, these services are being removed *precisely because no one relied on them*. They are services that are not getting widespread use, so they are being shut down. Are you still whining over the loss of Microsoft Bob, consigned to the dustbin of history because no one used it?
Yes, cloud services can be shut down. Google generally goes out of their way to make sure you can get your data out, and gives fairly generous time frames in which to do so. They seem to be better about it than most other companies, including those that produce only desktop apps.
Despite grouching to the contrary, there isn't much difference any more between a cloud app going away, and a desktop app being retired. If Microsoft suddenly decided to kill Windows tomorrow, how long could you continue to use it? I'm going to guess "Until the next time you swap out a video card, forcing you to reactivate your copy". What happens when the activation servers aren't there? You have to rely on the company to act properly, and give you a time frame to move to something else during which the activation servers will still be live, or they provide some permanent activation.
Yes, I think DRM sucks, I think activation schemes suck, but they already exist, and until they are gone (which seems fairly unlikely to me) there isn't a major difference between desktop software and cloud services, once the plug is pulled. It is no more 'ridiculous' to rely on cloud services than it is to rely on desktop apps, or the x86 architecture, or the public power grid. Any of those could be changed at any time, though some are far less likely than others to change. Is it more likely gmail goes away, or Outlook/Exchange? Both companies make a crazy amount of money from their offering. One is 'cloud based', one not. Which is more 'ridiculous' to rely on?
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I mourn the death of Clippy!
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Actually yes I do. There are/were ways to export your data before the servers shut down, and several projects (in various stages of operation) to operate home-brew servers.
Your option to continue using desktop software is illegal, and average users either don't know how, or don't want to break the law, to continue to use that software. I'm guessing it is also a situation most businesses don't want to get into, so your argument is useless. And while Google hasn't done this for all services, many (includin
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For Wikipedia: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/ [wikimedia.org]
For Office, there's Sironta [sironta.com]. Server-less P2P collaboration that works on the three major OSs. It's AGPLv3 licensed.
Re:Slashdot a Cloud Service (Score:2)
I sent a submission in a while ago asking Slashdot to provide a "seven click" method to export all my (aka your own) comments. However they didn't post the story and haven't done it.
I have a wealth of info locked in slashdot posts that I want to use for a blog but there's no way to download my post history that I know of. I even emailed help support and they emailed back saying that it wasn't currently a public feature. (Oh, yes, I'm quite sure they could do it if it mattered, we're back to "are you a Big E
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Oh hi, DCTech. Still doing your sockpuppetry, I see.
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Yeah - his focus on Google is completely irrational. Microsoft is pushing just as hard to put everything it has in the cloud, it's just that it has a lot of catching up to do. But the issues that Google faces with its cloud products are universal to all cloud products.
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It's not just a question of cloud services, from TFA:
In 2005 we acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics, helping businesses of all sizes measure their websites and online marketing. We’re fully committed to building an industry-leading online analytics product, so we’re saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.
So basically they're killing off the non-cloud self hosted version of their web analytics software in favor of the cloud version.
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Why would any company work with them now? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they can this easily kill off Google Message Continuity, something marketed only to Enterprise customers running Exchange, then why would any enterprise consider using any of their services? Their migration path is just to move everyone to Gmail. If that's what the company wanted in the first place, they would've just done that.
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If they can this easily kill off Google Message Continuity, something marketed only to Enterprise customers running Exchange, then why would any enterprise consider using any of their services? Their migration path is just to move everyone to Gmail. If that's what the company wanted in the first place, they would've just done that.
This was a money losing proposition from the get go, and one you can easily replicate by doing a proper server backup to any off-site location. "Hundreds of Businesses" use it.
What they found is that user wanted to use Gmail, entirely walking away from exchange. The more success they had selling Google Apps (including paid Gmail customers) the less candidates for GMC. "Millions of Businesses" use Google Apps.
If you missed the bit about Hundreds vs Millions you might be forgiven. It was buried fairly de
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That's progress (Score:5, Insightful)
The Google announcement doesn't leave many people stranded, it's just taking acquired products and sending the users to more popular web-based products. Examples include Urchiin users told to move to Google Analyitics, and Exchange backup users to move to GMail for Google Apps. In total, nothing of value is being lost, and developer resources move from maintaining the old to innovating the new.
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Google killed DejaNews deader than Julius Caesar.
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try again... it bought Deja and incorporated it into GoogleGroups.
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Yes. And boy THAT was a real mess.
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Might as well get rid of Google Groups too.
Oh, I don't know, profanity and all, I suggest its a sociological gold mine that gets more valuable as time goes on. It costs a little bit of disk space, but realistically the history is worth something.
You still find a lot of stuff posted over there about current products - it seems to be Google's Forum for tech support these days.
Re:That's progress (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you are wrong, here is an example: http://google.com/codesearch [google.com]
No more service, and no replacement (don't believe what they say, this service was indexing all source code on the Internet, not Google's only).
Google is killing every service that doesn't return quick money. This means that Google just stopped all innovation (except a few star projects, like Google car, but what does an advertisement's company do in the automobile's domain anyway ? It's so ... out of place).
Why would you want to take risks when you can make money with existing products ?
Why would you put money in Research when you can concentrate on Development ?
Oh, that's right: let's buy any startup that has an interesting idea, and kill the idea if it doesn't make money.
Google is ranked as the 2nd most innovative company in 2010:
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/innovative_companies_2010.html [businessweek.com]
Let's see how it will do in the next rankings.
The problem with Google is now greed.
Re:That's progress (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you explain to me how this is different than, say, every other company in the world? Apple's latest innovation? Siri? Bought from someone else, then magically it doesn't work on anything but their newest phone, despite the fact it was available as an app for the older phones? Microsoft? Even their browser was bought from someone else, not to mention FrontPage (I didn't say it was good...), Excel, the Explore pane in Bing... Adobe has DreamWeaver, Flash, Fireworks...
The problem with Google now is greed. Sadly though, that's the problem with every other company on the planet. Microsoft announces that from now on, web programming should be done in HTML5 and Javascript, and screw all of you that learned ASP.NET. Adobe gives you mobile flash, Adobe taketh away.
Google continues to push forward with new services (G+, Car) and continue to add to older services (New google search changes, gmail interface changes) even if those turn out not to be popular. The search thing seems to be earning them some grief in particular, yet they tried something new. They could easily have left gmail and search exactly as it was, or not started G+, or Reader, or Wave. They DID change things, and start new things though, so that kind of kills your argument that they aren't putting money into anything, or doing R&D.
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Microsoft announces that from now on, web programming should be done in HTML5 and Javascript, and screw all of you that learned ASP.NET. Adobe gives you mobile flash, Adobe taketh away.
How is that LISP or pascal serving you today? how about BASIC? or any number of other languages that are basically gone these days. How about all that "insert dead gui toolkithere"?
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About ASP.NET, you made a mistake. I'm an ASP.Net developer too. What disappears is Silverlight, not ASP.Net.
Sadly though, that's the problem with every other company on the planet.
Sadly, I agree with you.
When times are tough, all companies tend to reduce their expenses, and the first cuts are with employees and research.
In my opinion, this is very wrong, the economy slows down because every company has the same behaviour.
Having such a pessimistic point of view means that Google is not confident anymore in their products.
What irritates me is that the companies doing the most ef
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I'm sorry, can you please fill me in on the exciting innovations coming from Microsoft lately? Live tiles? On the google side, did you forget Car, Wave, G+, WDYL, Swiffy, Wallet, Offers, Music, Fusion Tables, Panoramio, Schemer... and those are just the recent ones. Some of those may be services they acquired from others, but some are also their own.
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Where do you see something exciting in these projects ?
They are just eye-catching, and I predict they will be killed in the near future (Wave is already dead).
See hairyfeet's reply, his fad's concept is so true.
About innovation, read this interesting article about 3M:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm [businessweek.com]
To sum it up: 3M had a culture of innovation during 100 years. A single CEO killed this culture in 4 years.
And 3M just got out of the top 50 most innovative companies:
http://www.bus [businessweek.com]
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No, I'm not an arbiter, but I'm old enough to not care about new services (especially social ones), and yes, I work on tools aggregating social media.
But instead of arguing, why not wait and check in the next following months who will be right ?
I'm much more interested in reality-check than belief-check.
I showed you how fast an innovative culture can be shattered.
I like Google Services, but frankly, as Hairyfeet said about Apple, they took all the low-hanging fruits, and if they intend to reduce expenses to
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Again, this applies to every single corporation, at least the western ones, who are all focused on next quarter, not next year or next decade. I fail to see why Google should look forward to failure, but Apple shouldn't, IBM shouldn't, Microsoft Shouldn't, Facebook shouldn't, Twitter shouldn't....
I also fail to see where you showed how fast an innovative culture can be shattered, let alone how Google qualifies. The "innovative" Google services you seem to have once loved weren't innovative then either. G
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You are so right about fads !
Everybody thinks that innovation must be eye-catching.
I recommend that you read Edwards Deming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming ). For example "The New Economics", it really hurts. He's right since 50 years, and was never listened in his own country.
Will Cook be able to predict new markets like Jobs did and stay one step ahead of the game, or will it be like the Pepsi guy where they try to coast on past success and slowly go downhill? In any case i'd say the next 5 years are gonna be pretty rough and tumble, especially if the economy keeps going south
After reading Steve Jobs' biography, my CEO told me that it was pure luck that Jobs was successful with Apple.
He was a psychopath, and he was obsessed with design.
It's just that his obsession matched the market.
I belie
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When a Google automated car comes and delivers your pizza with customized adSense ads, you will see what I am talking about. In fact the pizza box will have big green download arrow for some crappy software that looks like the tab to open the box.
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http://code.google.com/codesearch [google.com]
And it's not limited to just Google's own code. From this blog post: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/01/google-code-search-still-available.html [blogspot.com]
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Thanks ! I didn't notice it.
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and Exchange backup users to move to GMail for Google Apps. In total, nothing of value is being lost, and developer resources move from maintaining the old to innovating the new.
Is that sarcastic? A business is going to dump its massive investment in messaging systems: Servers, clients, handhelds, integration with other apps and systems -- and redo it all in GMail? Nothing of value is being lost?
How long until they kill google search :p (Score:5, Funny)
at this rate... this may be quicker than I thought possible
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With how crappy Google's search results have been getting, some may argue it already is dead.
Re:How long until they kill google search :p (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen, I love Google, but for any search that is slightly complicated I turn to Yahoo these days. Google doesn't seem to take you serious when you enter search terms, often ignoring terms to give a more popular result. Having to add quotes is also a hell of a lot more annoying than the + sign was. That is four keypresses for quoting a single expression. Quote a couple of expressions on a mobile phone and it just gets annoying. Also it forces localization on you, which gets a pain when you speak English and another language roughly equally well and just want the best result. I wish there was just a version that treated all languages equally. The problem is that the 'local' languages gets precedence, regardless of quality of result. Yes there are settings for them, they work like crap, try them for a while.
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Yahoo is just a layer above Bing, might as well use it directly.
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When you do your search, and decide that you don't like how Google helped "fix up" your query, you can use "verbatim" mode. On the left side of the screen you'll see a "search tools" link. Click that, and it will expand to a list of various search options. Click "verbatim" and you'll get exactly the terms you searched for, no spelling correction, no synonyms, etc.
I think for most people, the automatic "improvements" of their search queries yields better results, because most people aren't very precise
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That is four keypresses for quoting a single expression.
For some real fun, try and figure out how to get Google to search for a phrase rather than keywords and not automatically rewrite your query to what it thinks you really meant. Yay, nested quotes!
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Search is profitable because AdWords works well with it. The closed services were things that had Google compete with itself.
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Not to be redundant, but they've already killed the usefulness of the search. I've been using Google since their inception. I may be moving to Bing or Yahoo because Google's search results have regressed in quality substantially.
Google really needs to fix their shit. Consumer force only goes so far with technology: it's still very much the case that people look to their geek friends for technology recommendations.
UrchinTracker didn't give the info to Google (Score:4, Interesting)
UrchinTracker let advertisers track what users were doing, but didn't let Google track them. So it had to go. Big Brother doesn't like competition.
CONSUME! (Score:3)
watch out! here comes the google monster! It will gobble up your website and shit it out once its bored!
I actually kind of liked picnik, but whatever let the internet strip-mining continue ... thanks google
Sky Map (Score:3)
How about updating Picasa? (Score:2)
Picasa is a little long in the tooth and needs some new features and a UI change to make it more user friendly.
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Picasaweb has migrated to Google+ Photos, and Picnik is closed as a standalone and is instead called "Creative Suite" or something in the photo service. Just like the rest of Google's local applications, I doubt Picasa has a real future. Picnik (also on the chopping block in TFA) really needs to move from Flash to HTML5, and they need to work on the load time.
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There is always a need for local software for photos and video....If google does not want to maintain said software, that is fine, they will just need to maintain a publishing plugin for the software that replaces it.
Picasa, yes, but... (Score:1)
Is it just me that is getting middle-aged?
I fear for Google SketchUp (Score:4, Interesting)
Google SketchUp is a hugely useful, free 3D modeling program. It has become the de facto standard in lots of hobbies (such as woodworking) because it's free, works well, and now there's a bajillion community add-ons.
The problem is that it's Windows/Mac desktop software. It's completely orthogonal to Google's strategy. There's no ad revenue, and while there is a paid-for commercial version, I can't imagine it's big bucks for Google. The commercial version is $500, and at that price there's plenty of competition from other commercial packages.
I'm sure someone in the headier days of Google saw it and thought "wow, this is cool, let's buy it!" and so they did. But what really is the strategy/purpose of owning it? It's great software, no doubt, but I think Google would be hard-pressed to explain how it moves their company forward.
And so I fear for Google SketchUp. The free version is so awesome and I use it extensively...and I suspect some day someone in Google is going to discard it as carelessly as they bought it.
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The only real reason Google is keeping Sketch-Up is that it ties into Google Earth.
Unfortunately Google Earth's cancellation is already planned. As soon Google can reliably replicate enough of its functionality into the WebGL version of Google Maps, Google Earth will be gone.
In the plus side, at least there is some hope of Google releasing the Sketch-Up source, since it is not tied into any of Google's core technologies.
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Desktop Search Download (Score:2)
My pet peeve is Google going the Microsoft route of discontinuing support for an application (Desktop Search) by shutting down the download server so you can't get a copy for a reinstall, instead of footing the negligible (actually zero incremental) cost of keeping the download available on a server, OR of making the discontinued app open source.
Non-used projects (Score:1)
You wouldnt pay for a service nobody (or at least not enough customers) use.
I did not use these services, so please correct me if i am wrong.
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Start the meme! Open sourcing skymap is awesome! Thanks google!
Your meme is bad and you should feel bad.