Google Keep End-of-Life Date Forecasted 164
An anonymous reader writes "A smart aleck journalist for UK's Guardian newspaper has turned the tables on Google by compiling data on 39 of the company's terminated projects, summarized in a table and bar graph. The mean lifespan of the doomed products turns out to be almost exactly 4 years, which led Mr. Arthur to conclude that your data would be safe with Google Keep — until March 2017, give or take a few months. Of course, this assumes that Keep is destined to be one of those products and services that wouldn't be Kept, or rather 'didn't gain traction with users' in the familiar lingo of Google marketing."
I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I miss things like Code Search.
Well that's the only thing I used really.
But like, no one had to pay for these services. There was no contractual obligation in play. What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't have to. People are just pointing out that Google has a pattern of introducing services as trial balloons, and then discontinuing them a few years later if it doesn't fit into their overalls strategy. If you understand that and are okay with it, no problem. If you'd rather not have to scramble to find a replacement in a few years in the (not that unlikely) circumstance where the service is shut down, however, you might want to look elsewhere.
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:5, Insightful)
There is another term for that: Let a thousand flowers bloom. This is what Google has always done, try things. The things that work, that have an audience that can justify continued operation then they live. The ones that don't fail.
This is no different than how most companies work. The backlash against Readers closure is silly. Products fail, companies pivot, they aren't required to keep things going in perpetuity.
And Google lets you get your data out, which so many other failed products don't.
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So, your argument is that software is a popularity contest?
Very perceptive. Market share is just popularity. And the unpopular eventually lose, every time.
So the object lesson is: if you depend of a software product, make sure you depend on a popular software product. Otherwise, expect to be inconvenienced (or worse) sooner rather than later.
Potential object lesson 2: don't depend on any one else's software product. That's the point of the Free Software movement. But that requires a degree of technical comp
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:4, Insightful)
No my argument is that nothing is really ever assured. Anything and anyone can fail. Asteroids hit the earth, fires burn down houses, hard drives die, commercial software can fail to find a market, etc etc etc.
The world of software is littered with the corpses of dead companies and products. It has always been thus. Even free software can end up orphaned and so unmaintained it won't work on modern systems. It is foolish to believe any product will exist forever.
In the same way you should have a good 3, 2, 1 Backup strategy [dpbestflow.org] for your data, you should have a plan for what to do if products you rely on stop working.
I really don't get your point...
Re: I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:3)
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Which is fine up until the point where you want to change some part of your system that service relies on - another service's API, your underlying data storage technology, or just migrating from old server equipment. Now there's a whole load of costs incurred in just keeping the service exactly the same, which I doubt the low number of users and ad impressions sold are going to compensate for.
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:4, Insightful)
So the object lesson is: if you depend of a software product, make sure you depend on a popular software product. Otherwise, expect to be inconvenienced (or worse) sooner rather than later.
Which is precisely why people stick with MS. Regardless of what you think of their engineering or business practices, there is a certain amount of security in using the products that everyone else is using.
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Which is precisely why people stick with MS. Regardless of what you think of their engineering or business practices, there is a certain amount of security in using the products that everyone else is using.
With a few exceptions [wikipedia.org].
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Well, at least those applications aren't cloud services, so even with no support from Microsoft you can still install and use those applications. Sadly, it appears that won't be the case with some of Microsoft's current products.
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The backlash against Readers closure is silly.
That may be true (I was never a user), but that does not negate the bad PR they are getting from geeks telling normal people about not trusting Google anymore.
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Yeah I am not sure how true that is. If you can show some quantifiable effect, please do. Otherwise I suspect the so called Normal People will just continue to act as they otherwise would. I think we overestimate our influence on them.
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah I am not sure how true that is. If you can show some quantifiable effect, please do. Otherwise I suspect the so called Normal People will just continue to act as they otherwise would. I think we overestimate our influence on them.
Does it affect common users? Yes as I and others that usually vouch for Google are now cautious. They really should have held off longer between the two announcements and added more features to Keep. I won't be using it and will likely be wary of new services and will look to have alternatives lined out to switch current ones. Basically, I'm not as loyal to Google anymore, and that hurts them in the long run as I'm not alone.
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That is a logical argument, not an example of quantified evidence. Show me some evidence that regular users — who either never used Reader or stopped using it some time ago — are more concerned if Google will kill products or services or not; then we can talk.
But I am not interested in arguing about theoretical measurements of angel's tap shoes...
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Yes google earns money though ads. This isn't news. No one is forcing you to use Keep.
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Um Really? Because I have yet to work for a company that does that. The only time companies I have run/or worked at have spun off a new nameplate is when they don't want to dilute their main brand.
You are going to have to back this claim up with some data...
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You didn't phrase it as an exception, but as a description of standard practice. Avoiding brad dilution and trying to prevent backlash are two very different things.
Additionally creating a nameplate for every app would have negative implications for you brand as well. You want to people to associate your brand with something, if each app has its own then you get no halo effect.
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Sorry I meant suggestion not exception
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Really? Because Google's reason for getting rid of it is that it doesn't have a big enough audience for google. Therefor it failed at google. Other companies are making a go of news readers, but that doesn't mean it was a success for Google.
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That particular claim depends on how Google-service users are distributed. It's true that any one service shutdown affects a minority of overall Google users, since they tend to shut down the less popular ones. But what proportion of Google users do 20 service shutdowns affect? It depends on the distribution of users. It could be a small minority, basically the same early adopters who keep signing up for every doomed service. But it could affect a considerably larger number of users in aggregate, if the cor
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If you'd rather not have to scramble to find a replacement
Scramble? Really?
Please enlighten us which free Google service essential to your life disappeared overnight and how you had to put everything aside for a week to find said replacement and prevent terrible hardships.
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Is that what scramble means to you? That isn't what it means to me. I just looked it up in my dictionary and the dictionary has pretty much the definition that I have. To scramble is to hurriedly and haphazardly overcome an obstacle. The obstacle doesn't have to be a 'terrible hardship', in fact to me the word implies a not-so-terrible hardship. Without looking it up in a dictionary, how would you define "scramble"?
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Is that what scramble means to you? That isn't what it means to me. I just looked it up in my dictionary and the dictionary has pretty much the definition that I have. To scramble is to hurriedly and haphazardly overcome an obstacle. The obstacle doesn't have to be a 'terrible hardship', in fact to me the word implies a not-so-terrible hardship. Without looking it up in a dictionary, how would you define "scramble"?
Scrambling (in the only definition that reasonably applies to the GP post) implies is that it is absolutely necessary to hurry. Technically, you are correct and one could scramble for no apparent reason, but well, that is just stupid. Even more so when talking about finding a replacement for a free online service.
Logically, there should be some reason to hurry in finding the replacement. I will admit that 'terrible hardships' was a bit over the top.
Not as much as 'scramble', though.
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Yes, scrambling to me implies some kind of hurry. For instance, hurry up because you only have a few months to find a replacement. That's hurrying but I don't agree with the rest of what you said:
* essential to your life
* disappeared overnight
* put everything aside
* terrible hardships.
It's okay I just think you overreacted a little bit. I think 'scramble' was an appropriate word to use.
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You're kidding me, right?
In what world is 'a few months' an exceptionally short period to find a replacement for, say, an online email service?
No, I did not overreact. The person who used the word 'scramble' overreacted. And in a way that is frankly insulting to people who've ever actually had to scramble to do something. As I said: scrambling not only implies hurrying, but doing so in a haphazard/frantic way because there is extreme urgency. It is not a synonym of hurrying.
"Oh noes, Google Reader went away
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While you make some interesting points, you still haven't listed example of anything that disappeared overnight, or that had one scrambling. There are plenty of other feed readers out there, and there is a standard way to get your feeds out and into something else, and they are giving plenty of notice
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How about a gmail interface that can be used on small screens with large text?
You mean the new Gmail look that coexisted with the easily selectable old Gmail look for a year?
Have you noticed that lots of people -- google included -- now make sections of the browser window fixed, non-scrollable
You mean css position: fixed? Yeah, no website ever used that in the good old days.
1. Find documents not in any directory. You know: Everything you create goes in the root, not in any folder -- not changable. Anything you've classified or categorized with folders/tags is organized. Anything not so classified got lost. Suddenly, docs went from each to work with to painful.
Bullshit. Also, the service still exists. Are you saying they should never update it in any way? (insert this comment in all answers below)
2. A choice between page-layout oriented editing and free-form / web-page oriented editing. In fairness, this one was announced.
View -> Print layout.
3. A mail interface usable on smaller windows. Heck, a mail interface that doesn't assume it has the full screen.
You mean like the myriad of mobile versions that exist? Try http://m.gmail.com/ [gmail.com]
Or the basic HTML view? https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html [google.com] (admittedly, this one shoul
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Google has a strategy?
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:4, Interesting)
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You are not obligated but they certainly want you use their service, so it is fair to moan about it.
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:5, Interesting)
What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
It would be nice if they open-sourced these projects and then let the "minority of people" who actually use it maintain it themselves.
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like Wave?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave [wikipedia.org]
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What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
It would be nice if they open-sourced these projects and then let the "minority of people" who actually use it maintain it themselves.
True, on the other hand some of these projects can't... Because they are based on complicated infrastructure... Google Code search for example...
Anyways, we have seen Google open source etherpad, when they closed that service...
I also hate it when a service I use is closed (Google Reader for example), but at the end of the I respect Google for innovating and trying out different things, and that includes admitting that something was only a partial success, or not a success at all..
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Google is the new apple. "Hey, use this for your business. Opps, we're dropping it, good luck."
True, that's a significant risk when you build on top of Google services...
I'm toying with the idea of building a drive app. And pros and cons, are clear...
cons: google could drop support.
pros: free bandwidth, file storage, user authentication, sharing/permission-management
When using a Google Api like say drive... you take a risk (google could drop/change the api), on the other hand you can a lot of features that would otherwise have to spend time implementing.
The same risk assessment can be applied
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Easier said than done. A lot of the value isn't in the software as much as the service.
Google Reader being a good example. A web-based RSS reader as well as mobile versions... The web-based interface is decent, but quite frankly the Android version is weak, not to mention buggy. The main advantage to both as RSS interfaces is that they don't really get in your way.
The real va
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What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
Google's time and money is what it probably comes down to. Somewhere deep in the accounting department they figure out that the quality of data they are mining is not enough to offset the actual cost of running the service. It's true that a larger user base would create a larger data set and therefore be more likely to be profitable for them, but if it's just a different representation of the same data there really isn't any point. They can figure out what we're interested in from Search, what we actua
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not about licensing cost, it's about migration cost.
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What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
None whatsoever. Entering into such a deal, where the other party obviously has no obligation to you, is a bad idea--and that's largely the point here, even if obscured by the clever attempts at humor ;-)
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I get the point that we are not entitled to use these products, because we aren't paying for them.
But there are two points, really:
1) Anger is a way of expressing that people do actually care about the services. If they shut them down with nobody saying anything, then they are right. Conversely, if lots of people kick up a fuss, maybe they see that they are wrong (in thinking that people don't use it).
2) And this one is particularly pertinent to things like Google Sync/Exchange ActiveSync. Just because users aren't paying for the services, doesn't mean that they wouldn't. If I had the option to simply upgrade my Google Mail to a paid apps account / simply pay to retain the features that they are cutting from the free account, then maybe I would. I would *certainly* pay for a "Google Apps for Home", which kept Google Reader, EAS (upgraded to work with Outlook 2013), etc.
But they don't offer that option. That I don't pay for these services, isn't my fault in not seeing the value. It is their fault in providing the option.
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Regarding 1), Google has full access to the Reader accounts. This isn't desktop software, they know full well who and how much people use it. The "fuss" is nothing but a storm in our little bubble of technologists. There's a whole world that uses Google products and doesn't even know Reader exists.
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Oh, I get the point that we are not entitled to use these products, because we aren't paying for them.
Yes, we were. We paid for them with the data Google uses to sell us advertisements. Moreover their shut-down incurs definite migration costs.
We have every right to complain.
Of course, Google has every right to ignore us and shut down whatever they want, but the claim that we weren't paying for them so we should shut up about it is moronic.
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:4, Insightful)
There was no contractual obligation in play. What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
There's no contractual obligation for users to put on a happy face either. The fact is that it's kinda annoying when a service that you've come to rely on gets shut down.
Google doesn't have a responsibility to provide free services to everyone but it is in their interest to build trust amongst their user base. Otherwise no one is going to invest any time into things like Google Keep.
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:5, Interesting)
There was no contractual obligation in play. What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
It's not hate, its disgust at the stupidity of it all. Google created these ancillary products to draw people into the Googlesphere, and it worked. As someone from Google has said "The lifetime value of a Chrome user is enormous." Google's ancillary projects drew in people and Google prospered.
In the short term, Google can kill the products that are marginally effective in drawing in new eyeballs, but that sound you hear as they cancel projects that drew people in is the sound of people heading for the exits. That smoke is from the burning of bridges.
Google's near sighted cancelation of today's well liked projects is erecting barriers to acceptance of its future offereings. Google's real product is people, and Google is polluting its product stream with disapointed people who are tiring of learning to use a tool only to have it taken away. Not a good long term strategy.
I won't be using Google+, or Google Docs, or or Google Drive, or Keep, or Google's NIK software, or Chrome, and definitely not a Chromebook, since any of these can disapear or be rendered unusable on a whim.
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The solution on the Chromebook end is to install Linux - and as of now they still have a switch on the laptop (under the battery in my Cr-48) that turns off verified boot, allowing users to install any OS they want (that will run on the hardware - Win7, Chrubuntu, and OSX have been shown working in the wild).
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Doom!.......Catastrophe!.......End of the World!
Sheesh, back up your data already.
It doesn't matter if it's Google, or Sixpak Joe's Data Shack, or any other cloud service here.
If you aren't backing up your stuff, then it all is at risk, and it's your own fault if you lose stuff...no different from a HDD failure in your PC.
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that's not a real solution though, because if you've been using the chromebook for several years then all of your work and workflow are going to be in the google ecosystem. if they shut that off, then sure you can install linux or whatever, but that's the same thing as getting a new computer. you're stuck at starting from square 1. So the problem of losing your computer still exists, with the benefit of computer recycling / lower up-front costs for a new computer.
Exactly! You should never switch switch to a new OS and ecosystem, because it isn't possible to move and convert data from one system to another!
I've thought about transitioning to a Linux, Mac, or Windows PC, but it was bad enough getting fooled into making the transition from DECB to OS-9 ecosystems on my TRS-80 CoCo 3!
It's just not worth the hassle.
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Is that really a Chrome issue, or a Google eco system issue? Or maybe even cloud services in general? Should we not use Google services at all? Isn't any "cloud" services vulnerable to shutting down? At the very least, isn't Google good about giving you sufficient warning to migrate off their service? Have they not also grandfathered in many services so those on them could continue still using them, just unsupported? In other instances, haven't they passed on some of their projects to other groups to
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Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:4, Interesting)
What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
None.
What reason do people have to give personal information to a company that takes no responsibility over it's products?
Remember; your time and information is only free if it's worthless. You ARE paying Google with something valuable, just not currency.
Re:I don't understand all the anger over Google (Score:4, Insightful)
This deserves a car analogy.
Suppose a private individual decides to allow drivers to use some of his privately owned land to take a shortcut to avoid a swamp.
Now suppose there are competing grits delivery companies. Delivery Companes A and B start using the shortcut, and they sell off their SUVs because they no longer have to muck through the swamp. Company C uses the shortcut, but since he cannot trust it to stay there, he holds on to the SUVs. Company C goes out of business because Companies A and B don't need to buy as much gasoline since they do not have SUVs, and they underbid company C for new contracts.
Then the private individual decides he wants to close the shortcut to build a large statue of Natalie Portman.
The business of grits delivery being one with tight margins, Company A and B cannot afford to buy SUVs on such short notice. Company A goes bankrupt trying to finance SUVs, and Company B just stops grits delivery to people that live on the other side of the swamp.
Now nobody on the other side of the swamp has any grits at all. Sure they all saved a few pennies on 4AM deliveries of hot grits in the meantime, but it wasn't worth going cold turkey.
The moral of the story is that building something useful but ephemeral, especially if the stability of that thing is unpredictable, destabilizes markets by playing on their inherent vulnerability to human greed and shortsightedness. There may be zero legal obligation to ensure the stability of the service, and your standard disclaimers in the EULA that you can end it at any time may protect you from any sort of legal action, but for a company with a "do no evil" motto, marketing, advertising, and then killing such a product tends to produce consequences far from their stated ideal.
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LOL - nice analogy and nice callbacks to Slashdot of yore! :)
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Then the private individual decides he wants to close the shortcut to build a large statue of Natalie Portman [followed by tale of destruction of grits delivery infrastructure, due to this decision].
Although the motives of the private individual are impeccable in this case, this is why we have the legal concept of an easement [wikipedia.org] - to prevent terrible tragedies like this.
Market failure through unquantifed risk (Score:2)
Great analogy as an example of "market failure" due in part to "unquantified risk" (and to a lesser extent de-facto monpoly by market position).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure [wikipedia.org]
"Market failures are often associated with information asymmetries, non-competitive markets, principal-agent problems, externalities, or public goods. The existence of a market failure is often used as a justification for government intervention in a particular market."
From another domain, but a related example of greed and
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people didn't even have a chance to pay for them.
that's the gist, it seems so random from user point of view.
people gave flack to gm for cancelling ev1 too. some people liked it, but gm didn't want to bother with it.
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What people *should* take away from this is that the fad of software as a service carries an extreme risk. Sure, for things highly contingent upon networking effects (e.g. mail), SaS doesn't really change the dynamic. However, for things like RSS reading, document editing, photo editing, and so on and so fourth, with all other things being equal, it's better to pick the offline capable model where you still have capability no matter what the vendor decides to do or if the vendor fails completely.
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There was no contractual obligation in play. What responsibility does Google have to spend time and money on infrastructure on products that are used by the minority of people?
Perhaps, but there is a key dependency problem. If you introduce a free service which people come to depend on, and if you pulling the service results in costs/damages/lives lost, there is at least a moral obligation, if not a legal obligation, to keep the service running, or at least add a fee instead of discontinuing it directly. Now, of course, Reader and Keep aren't that critical of a service, but if say Google Wallet becomes one of the de-facto methods of payment and Google decides to pull the plug
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In your analogy there's a moral obligation because people would fucking die otherwise. To compare this with using another RSS reader (even if somehow worse) is asinine.
If I were to run a service, I would probably feel a moral obligation to keep it running, much like I did in the past feel an obligation to keep my open source extensions up to date and available.
But if some entitled fuck had come and whined that I had that moral obligation, I'd cut him off immediately. There's stuff that may be morally impera
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In your analogy there's a moral obligation because people would fucking die otherwise. To compare this with using another RSS reader (even if somehow worse) is asinine.
Can you read, Mr. Asinine? "Now, of course, Reader and Keep aren't that critical of a service" "A somewhat contrived analogy would be"
If I were to run a service, I would probably feel a moral obligation to keep it running, much like I did in the past feel an obligation to keep my open source extensions up to date and available.
So you agree with me
But if some entitled fuck had come and whined that I had that moral obligation, I'd cut him off immediately.
So you're a kid who gets angry if someone tells you you should do something. Let me tell you, in society, society expects all sorts of things from you, some reasonable, some unreasonable, and if you're going to get angry every time someone tells you you should do something, you're going to have a lot of problems.
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"Now, of course, Reader and Keep aren't that critical of a service" "A somewhat contrived analogy would be"
I think it's asinine when applied to Google Wallet as well, and calling it a contrived analogy is an understatement. You're free to disagree.
If I were to run a service, I would probably feel a moral obligation to keep it running, much like I did in the past feel an obligation to keep my open source extensions up to date and available.
So you agree with me
No, because you're judging others, while I don't feel I have the right to do that in this case. I would feel a moral obligation to do so, but that doesn't mean I think Google (or anyone else) does.
So you're a kid who gets angry if someone tells you you should do something.
No, it depends on what, who said it and for what reasons. And I wouldn't really feel angry, but I would feel some schadenfreude after cutting them off.
Let me tell you, in society, society expects all sorts of things from you, some reasonable, some unreasonable, and if you're going to get angry every time someone tells you you should do something, you're going to have a lot of problems.
Considering I've been c
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"if you're going to get angry every time someone tells you you should do something, you're going to have a lot of problems."
In America we have an entire major political party dedicated to exactly that. But you're right, they do cause a lot of problems.
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How is that different from the way any other company should be treated? Should people not point out that their previous such products were canned after X-months ? After all, if Google wants our data, we should be pressuring them to keep their products around for a long period of time. When no such user pressure exists, Google will just keep on launching new products that capture user data for monetizing and when they are unable to do so, they simply shut down their projects without any repercussions. (The r
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First, Google isn't making any money from Reader but it must have been getting something out of it or else they never would have put it online in the first place. Part of what they're getting is goodwill, so that people will further equate "Google" with "useful product". Now that they're closing Reader, they lose that goodwill. And if we the users make a big enough stink about it, if we make it very expensive for them to shut down Reader, than next time they will have to factor that into their calculatio
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One of the things I liked about Google when it was introduced was they assumed all terms were for Boolean "AND". Then they dropped that, so you had to add a "+" in front of each term. Now you have to put quotes around each term. Not only do they do a Boolean OR, but they will look for synonym ORs of what you searched for, resulting in strange results. At first it was just different tenses or conjugations of the same word, now the searches are just random.
Plus it will offer suggestions of frequently searched
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Try setting Search Tools -> All Results to "Verbatim". It doesn't fix all the issues, but it often helps, in my persona experience.
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I agree with this. The #1 reason I started using Google, lo those many years ago, was because when I search for a word I want that word in 100% of the results returned. To be honest, this is so fucking obvious that I was amazed all search engines at the time didn't work that way. Now, I'm amazed that Google doesn't work that way. I've tried to switch to Duck Duck Go, which is not too bad but their results leave something to be desired. Today, in 2013, the world wide web does not have a very good search engi
That's the downside of using the Internet like (Score:4, Interesting)
....a set of mainframe services. Re-brand it as 'cloud' all you want-- Over the long term, its not the best fit.
Its better to have locally-running apps that give you a choice of data storage points (especially local and private VPN).
Seriously, nothing to see here. (Score:2)
The mean lifespan of the doomed products turns out to be almost exactly 4 years
And that's just it: The MEAN.
If you look at the graph, there is a slight flat spot there, but really, over all, it's a pretty constent slope all the way up.
Seriously, nothing to see here.
downside of SaaS (Score:5, Interesting)
This really is a big negative of Software as a Service. When you own something, you can run it forever, even if the developer decides to stop using it.
I have some simulation software for electrical design that was last updated in 1998. Still works fine and gets the job done. If it were on the cloud I'd be out of luck and forced to continually move my data between paid services. Too bad.
Fucked by a cloud (Score:3)
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When you own something, you can run it forever, even if the developer decides to stop using it.
In theory, yes you can keep using unsupported software. The reality is that most companies would ultimately be better off if they were forced to drop it sooner rather than later. It hurts to rip off that bandaid, but it's usually worth it.
Absolutely not true (Score:2)
And this is listed as funny? (Score:2)
Why?
In all seriousness, despite the weakness of the statistics (33 points does not make a universe, particularly with such widely scattered data), this is simply a codification of the reluctance many feel about trusting vital data to Google. It's interesting to note how many projects Google has shuttered, and the lengths of time they were live. I do appreciate the fact that the author has provided his raw data so that we can draw our own conclusions.
Except Your Data Will Still Be Safe... (Score:2)
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well technically drive would be shut down a while before it, on average.
I predict a re-branding of it within 5 years anyways.
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So now all of my notes are stored in Google Drive, but that isn't doing me any good because Keep wont read them. If Keep eventually shuts down, sure the data might survive, but will anything be able to use it?
Does search in GDrive not work for you? If it's searchable (and already stored in GDrive), your data is still usable.
For me, search within GDrive is the main reason to use it (well, and archival). It's faster than my desktop search.
Therefore, if you want Google Keep to survive... (Score:2)
iGoogle (Score:2)
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I don't think Google Reader that that much notice though. 4 months notice: http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html [blogspot.ca]
Are they Trending this? (Score:3)
Struck a Nerve (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Breaking-down the obvious:
- Laymen could get Reader's benefit
- Geeks saw a product that only told Google that some RSS source interested them.
- Those geeks like Google's open-source policy & assumed to unprofitable would become open-sourced.
- Reader wasn't open-source, tarnishing this image.
- A simple open-source promise could save them a lot of hassle.
Unless perhaps Google wants to give free cloud services a black-eye?
It certainly made me consider installing my own jsPerf instance.
On the plus side... (Score:3)
Google+ launched on June 28, 2011.
They will stop trying to shove it down our throats on estimated June 28, 2015.
We are half way there.
no correlation. (Score:2)
The graph clearly shows that there is no correlation to 4 years. it shows a wide, fairly even, range. Where a few months is as likely as 10 years.
4 years is the average, nothing more.
Google is doing us a service (Score:3)
Google is doing us a service by reminding us that online services, data storage, etc come and go. Don't rely on any one company if a service or your data is important to you.
Reality bites and it's good to have an occasional nip like this latest one from Google to remind us of that.
He's not being a "smart aleck" ... (Score:2)
He's not being a "smart aleck" ... ... he's doing analytics.
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The "Evil" was reference to Google's old saying of "Do No Evil". Sorry if you're too young to remember. It was over a decade ago. Perhaps that was before you were born. Old history. Just ignore it. Rinse and repeat.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed.
I was reminded of a scene that I saw I don't remember how long ago now, I think it was a Dilbert comic, or something similar... where there was some guy's presentation that was totally boring everybody, until he mentions that he has a graph, and then when pulls out a large form cardstock sheet with a colored pie graph and bar chart from his folder and puts it on the easel where he is doing his presentation, he suddenly has the undivided attention of everyone in the room, as they say "oooooooooh" i
Re:companies discontinue software (Score:5, Insightful)
You can still keep using the old software and your data. In Google's case, once the service is gone so is your data. Think of it this way, Honda discontinues the RSX they don't go and blow up all the RSX they've sold. The time, data and energy you put into an online service is your investment and when it's discontinued you lose that investment.
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A proper car analogy would be GM's EV1. They didn't sell them, only leased them out, and when GM decided to discontinue the project they took the cars back (despite protests from many of the "owners") and crushed them.
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you could still use frontpage to create sites.. if you wanted. you can still use your works package from 2001. there's no mandatory activation, no shit like that. you could even use them on your windows 8 installation.
(not so with older apple sw though, you'd need to have an old apple too).
headlines write themselves! (Score:5, Funny)
"Google doesn't keep Google Keep"
"What's keeping Google from keeping Google Keep?"
"Keep on keeping: Google keeps Google Keep (for now)"
Re: (Score:2)
love the language.
But seriously, the submitter is a moron who had a slow news day.
Keep is tied directly to docs and drive. So, your data isn't going anywhere.
and nothing of value was lost.
Re:headlines write themselves! (Score:5, Insightful)
Even docs and drive aren't guaranteed. That's the whole thing with hosting services, they could disappear and there would be nothing you can do about it. So anything on cloud storage provider better be backed up by you, and applications to manage the content should either be free or you should have a persistent license and ability to run not tied to the continued whims and welfare of the vendor.
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I pay google for the storage they provide.
My data is safe. They are obligated by law to provide me notice if they're gonna shut down.
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If I have a Toyota car and Toyota decides to get out of the business or collapses, my car doesn't vanish.