A Eulogy For Every Product Google Has Ruthlessly Killed (145 and Counting) (fastcompany.com) 111
An anonymous reader shares a report: Tez. Trendalyzer. Panoramio. Timeful. Bump! SlickLogin. BufferBox. The names sound like a mix of mid-2000s blogs and startups you'd see onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt!. In fact, they are just some of the many, many products that Google has acquired or created -- then killed.
While Google is notorious for eliminating underperforming products -- because even though these products often don't cost much for ongoing operations, they can pose a serious legal liability for the company -- it's rare to hear them spoken of after they've been shuttered. In fact, Killed By Google is the first website to memorialize them all in one place. Created by front-end developer Cody Ogden, the site features a tombstone and epitaph for each product the company has killed since it originated.
While Google is notorious for eliminating underperforming products -- because even though these products often don't cost much for ongoing operations, they can pose a serious legal liability for the company -- it's rare to hear them spoken of after they've been shuttered. In fact, Killed By Google is the first website to memorialize them all in one place. Created by front-end developer Cody Ogden, the site features a tombstone and epitaph for each product the company has killed since it originated.
Who cares about fucking products (Score:5, Insightful)
I weep for the most important thing Google has killed with them: the right to privacy and anonymity.
As for the products, they *have* to keep only the best ones: they're the trojan horses into people's lives. The products have to be so compelling that everybody feels they can't do without them, even at the cost of feeding Google their most intimate details. Excellent products are the keystone of their business model: no good products, no data.
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Dude, we couldn't agree more. This is Google. The company that puts a microphone in your thermostat and wants to know where you are going so much that they are willing to invent a driverless car to take you there.
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YES!!! I was just going to post the same thing. Google may as well be a division of the NSA and CIA. Untrustworthy and suspect in any offering they give up for "free."
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Google may as well be a division of the NSA and CIA.
You make it sound like they aren't. The CIA helped create Google [medium.com].
Don't be evil. (Score:3)
I think the great thing about Google has been that they have been the only company to actually tell people how and in what ways people have traded their privacy for convenience.
Look at Verizon. They sold all your phone records (and presumably your internet records) to the government without even telling you. Oh and they made sure to lobby Congress to exempt them from privacy laws and agreements so they couldn't even effectively be sued by the customers they screwed over.
Looks like most of the telecoms did
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"Look at Verizon. They sold all your phone records (and presumably your internet records) to the government without even telling you. Oh and they made sure to lobby Congress to exempt them from privacy laws and agreements so they couldn't even effectively be sued by the customers they screwed over."
You do understand that this looks bad for your government... not Verizon right? You are definitely blaming the wrong group here. The relationships between telco and government is a long and twisting one and Ver
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You are wrong and here is why.
Verizon is mostly doing what they are told, its not like you are going to do anything to change it are you? It is only natural they are going to want immunity. Would you be okay with being required to give the government unfettered access to your data, be required to do so AND have no immunity from that collection?
I am totally okay with you being disgusted by it, I am as well, but it does little good when the wrong group is being blamed. It's like blaming a person being blac
Re: Don't be evil. (Score:4, Insightful)
do you seriously think that matters? In fact do you even think that would have worked? Not even a chance, and you know better.
Between both sides wiping their asses with the constitution and trying to cook it for their mid day meal there is exactly no chance a business is going to win that scenario. It is well known that the game is not played that way. Very few companies have the conviction lavabit does. By the way, do you have a lavabit email account? If you are not putting your money where your mouth is, perhaps you should not say much about this.
There is a reason governments do not let a terrible situation go to waste, all tyranny comes from this, it's even a quote from a founding father of the USA.
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
~Madison
It should read...
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, -HERE OR- from abroad.
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Indeed, this is why I advocate for single product ownership. It is much harder for Google to aggregate personal data when they don't also own all the downstream products. But I don't think people are getting the connection with that. If a business gets to own so much stuff at once, it is IMPOSSIBLE to have any privacy because they know so much about the rest of you that you cannot keep anything a secret. People are going to be so disappointed thinking that government is going to save them... government
Moving away from the internet (Score:1)
I'm just moving away from the internet altogether. I'll use Wikipedia and slashdot and that's about it, spending less and less time on the internet and feeling better for it. I did post under my actual name and picture but only false things that constantly conflict with previous posts. I guess I'll see what happens with that.
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I'm not convinced there is such a right, or that if there is, if you haven't voluntarily traded it away the minute you search on Google or use Chrome. The only evil that Google committed is not making that even more obvious (I would have said it's been obvious since nearly the beginning).
You need do neither of those things.
Like a lot of conveniences, there is a cost, it's just hidden from view. Or did people really think Google built their massive networks of data centers (on which they spend $5bn per qua
Fail Fast (Score:3)
I do like that they put things out there. They are too slow to remove the ones that don't work. I do think that they can do a better job of doing the old-school beta approach. I loved Inbox. Having to move back to Gmail in the past couple of months has been frustrating.
Re:Fail Fast (Score:5, Insightful)
They are too slow to remove the ones that don't work.
I disagree: I think them ruthlessly killing off "unpopular" products is actually harming adoption in general. I don't bother trying new google products since I don't want to get used to something when there's a 95% chance it'll disappear soon. I doubt I'm alone in this.
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To be fair half the stuff on the list was just rolled into other products. Like news and weather is part of Play Newsstand now, and Reply is built in too Gmail.
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To be fair half the stuff on the list was just rolled into other products.
Yeah I was pretty disappointed by the site when I saw that. Something called a different name hasn't been killed off.
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I do like that they put things out there. They are too slow to remove the ones that don't work. I do think that they can do a better job of doing the old-school beta approach. I loved Inbox. Having to move back to Gmail in the past couple of months has been frustrating.
Herein lies the rub of Google's method of deploy-and-depreciate, in conjunction with "as little software running on the client machine as possible, with as little data remaining there as practical."
Microsoft released Windows Home Server 2011 in, well, 2011. It had all the appeal of administering an SBS2008 server, but without AD, IIS, DNS, DHCP, or...pretty much any other role of an actual-server, and only HP released machines for it with a maximum of four HDD bays, and banked on a Windows Media Player lock
In otherwords... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
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Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
In other words... which of their competitors paid for the article?
Re:In otherwords... (Score:4, Insightful)
Competitor to what? The chief complaint about most of these is that they had no competitor.
Re: In otherwords... (Score:2)
If they had no competition for these products, then what does that say about the market and the ability to monetise on the concept?
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If they had no competition for these products, then what does that say about the market and the ability to monetise on the concept?
That people don't actually want it? That is entirely the point of Google's free developer time that promoted "brainstorm" style see what sticks ideas. It was only natural that this would result in a lot of failed products / services.
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Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
Some teams at work want to move their data into to Google cloud. Really? Bob's Roadside Cloud and Bait Shop is more likely to be around in 5 years.
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+1. The low attention span Google has makes me dismissive of just about anything they release no matter how good it sounds or operates.
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I wonder how much usage plays into their decision to pull a project. After all, Google+ was around for waaay longer than it seems it should have. For all I know it's still around.
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Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
Meh. The important ones stick around. Gmail, docs/drive/whatever-it-is-today ...
Heck, Gmail has been more persistent than any other email provider I ever had.
No, don't get too dependent on any external service, but still, we may as well be realistic about the alternatives.
Re:In otherwords... (Score:4, Informative)
Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
Heck, Gmail has been more persistent than any other email provider I ever had.
AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Erols, Earthlink, and email.com are still running. Prodigy is defunct now, but it was around for 27 years so Gmail can take their crown in 2031.
If we're allowed to count hosting providers, 1and1, GoDaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost, InMotion, and Verio all still exist, and have all offered e-mail longer than Google has.
If universities count, MIT is where e-mail started in the 1960's, and to this day if you were a student there, you can keep your MIT e-mail address for life. Many universities have similar policies. ...so if your e-mail host didn't outlast Gmail, there were plenty that didn't. They've still got a decade to go before they start turning heads for longetivity, though.
Acquisition is about 2 things (Score:1)
#1. Increasing your own product line.
#2. Removing competition.
Both in the vast majority of cases becomes a negative to a free market because it foments monopoly. The more increased a product line is the more lock in you wind up getting into, even though increasing product line is "usually" beneficial. And with the removal of competition... well that is easy enough on its own.
Monopolies are not free-market, monopolies are products of lazy citizens that refuse to perform the "self-policing" that they ofte
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lol... yea that is true, People are already wanting to throw me off the Tower of Commerce for it!
I need someone to rub my lobes before they toss me!
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lol, no, its one business one product that would naturally mean another business cannot own another business... buy that virtue umbrella corporations would be destroyed and impossible to build. It would also prevent shell corporations and the like as well.
Regarding your other totally legit argument about "partnerships"... those can be addressed with anti-trust laws, but realistically, if there are no large players, it really makes it potentially bad for business for a company to make these kinds of deals b
Let's not forget ones they lobotomized, too (Score:3)
(Yes, I'm looking at you, the poor maimed shell of the thing formerly known as Google Finance: http://sneakyfalcon.com/the-ne... [sneakyfalcon.com] ).
Not really a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
1. You get what you pay for. The entire point of each service is to see if they can monetize it. When the monetization fails to cover the expense of providing the service then they cut their losses. If you fail to recognize that you are the product when it comes to free web services then you're going to have a bad time.
2. Services, like everything on the web, are short-lived. So if you haven't recognized that "the cloud" is composed of computers you don't own and if you don't mirror your data elsewhere then you're going to have a bad time.
3. FOSS never dies. If you get a FOSS computer program that (doesn't rely on outside information and) you like then it will never abandon you. It might not be perfect, it's might be unsupported but at no point will someone take it away from you because it's on your computer and it runs on your computer.
Here's a question (Score:2)
If they're so intent on finding money in everything, why not start charging people for a version of it?
Seriously. Google is big enough, does enough business, has other things they charge for, why not have converted some of these to a paid service? Sure it sucks going from gratis to not-gratis, but if the alternative is to not have the service at all, then I would think a non-trivial number of people would pay for it. AFAIK, nothing in the law would keep them from continuing to make a product of those now pa
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If they're so intent on finding money in everything, why not start charging people for a version of it?
Simple, people won't pay for it. There is a lot of interesting psychology that goes on and at the present, people are unwilling to pay for simple online software based services. The basic problem is that people aren't being paid nearly enough for the jobs they are doing for corporations and are therefore much more conservative in their spending.
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#1 - hmmm, yes and no... (Score:2)
1. You get what you pay for. The entire point of each service is to see if they can monetize it. When the monetization fails to cover the expense of providing the service then they cut their losses. If you fail to recognize that you are the product when it comes to free web services then you're going to have a bad time.
In general - yes, you are right. But this is only true as long as enough people allow it. It doesn't really apply to me as much.
e.g. I use google maps to check traffic (on my phone) before heading into work. But my location is turned off. I use google maps from my computer, to find something or to check traffic. But I am not logged in with my google account.
So for those that don't know, google traffic uses google user's location info to be able to give traffic reports. It's really quite great - as lon
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I was curious what products are still around (Score:2)
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But the list is defiantly shorter than what they have killed.
But whom does it defy?
Stupid way to do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Google basically throws services at a wall and sees what sticks. No actual plans. No strategy. And they throw it away as soon as it stops sticking, even if it's been around a while.
To me, this means one very simple thing: Don't use anything by google that doesn't already have a massive following cause you may find the rug pulled out from under you at any moment.
Apart from Android, AdSense and maps, there's really nothing Google makes that I would trust to depend on as a critical service.
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Yeah very stupid. If they want to survive in this digital ag... *whisper* what? ... hold up... $40 billion? ... just last quarter? ... ...
Scratch that. I have no comment about how stupid this tactic is for google.
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Google hasn't made money off of this approach, is the thing.
The only products created after Google's early days with any real succes are Android and Chrome. Neither was their normal "lets try everything with no strategy" strategy. Both were strategic defensive plays for their core business.
They've wasted so much money and talent on this "try everything and see what sticks" approach, and gotten nothing for it.
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Think how much money google would have if they sold products they decide aren't popular enough, instead of killing them. I'm sure there'd have been plenty of buyout offers for most of them.
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A lot of products have massive followings. Google Reader was a popular RSS thing, and Google Wave was oddly huge in Brazil.
Google can just axe what you're using one day and that's it.
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It may not be as popular as GMail, but Hangouts has an absolutely massive user base.
They're killing it with no direct replacement in a year or so.
So even lots of users won't save you if Google doesn't feel they can monetize it.
Google Reader (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm especially bitter about the loss of Google Reader, the RSS news feed aggregator. I got by with so-so replacements for a few years and finally rolled my own with FreshRSS on my home server.
That one I miss. Reader was nice. And I just can't be bothered to roll my own.
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Yep, only one I miss. I should go to FreshRSS on my own server, but I settled for G2Reader. Buggy but low-effort on my end.
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Feedly [feedly.com] is a great, free replacement. That's what I moved to way back then and still read SlashDot and hundreds of other sources on it daily.
And Microsoft list would be how long? (Score:2)
While I do wish that Google didn't abandon/kill off so many things, how long would the list at Microsoft be of products that have been either purchased or developed in house and then killed or had their functionality for the rest of the world destroyed?
Then how many products that worked fine in version X of Windows are now broken due to lack of backward compatibility?
Then you could do the same thing with Linux or Apple or any other big company or group.
Blaming only Google for this annoying behavior se
Re:And Microsoft list would be how long? (Score:5, Informative)
how long would the list at Microsoft be of products that have been either purchased or developed in house and then killed or had their functionality for the rest of the world destroyed?
Microsoft keeps shit around for a long time, actually. You might not like their version of something they acquired, but the broad market generally does. MS's crime was taking products that nerds liked, and turning into products that normies liked. Bastards.
Then how many products that worked fine in version X of Windows are now broken due to lack of backward compatibility?
They've always had the best backwards compatibility of any OS. Windows 7 is still supported for another year, making it 11 years of support. Anything in C/C++ that actually followed the advice in the API docs never broke with a new OS version, until 64-bit OSs stopped running 16-bit apps (by which time GOG had almost every 16-bit app I actually cared about). Most software that got clever using APIs in unsupported ways will work if you pick the right OS version in the emulation dropdown. C# software just keeps chugging along, for better or worse.
That just isn't a fair complaint about MS.
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They've always had the best backwards compatibility of any OS.
No they've always had the best backwards compatibility of any OS you've used. But you've not used OS/390.
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You assume ... wrong. But I forgot about the mainframe stuff.
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No surprise. (Score:2)
This was a company that once gave employees 20% free time to work on whatever the heck they want and then attempted to monetise the result. This is the natural response to such a strategy. Yeah it may piss off a lot of people who use these products but you can't argue with $40bn / quarter as being a losing strategy.
Of course I can (Score:3)
Google wasn't letting products launch whenever their employees called it 'done'. The level of fanfare to announcements was certainly uneven, but the net result is a bit of an oversimplification since that $40 billion is primarily from ads.
Postini already had a business model when they were acquired. So did Picasa. So did Orkut. If these weren't money makers, why did they buy them? If they were, why not let them make money? It's entirely possible for Google to have products that are pay-with-money rather tha
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Google wasn't letting products launch whenever their employees called it 'done'.
Didn't say they were. I only said they had a structure which promoted supporting random ideas.
but the net result is a bit of an oversimplification since that $40 billion is primarily from ads.
Not really. Their ad sales are primarily driven by the access to people which is massively helped by "monetisation" of these random products. They directly support this profit.
Postini already had a business model when they were acquired. So did Picasa. So did Orkut. If these weren't money makers, why did they buy them?
Technology. The misconception is that Google kills something and all traces and work contributed to it disappear. This is actually quite rare. The vast majority of what Google kills they do so because of feature consolidation. What was bought
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They're allergic to support and when people pay with money they want support. When people pay with their personal secrets they don't want support.
This leaves out dramatic changes (Score:2)
For example, I can barely use my Google Voice number.
It migrated to hangouts, but hangouts seems to be a dead app that crashes on my phones now (I get a notification, but can't use it on two phones).
Is there still Google Voice? is it part of Hangouts? Was it wrapped into Google+ and that's why it died?
I really can't tell, and don't have the patience to figure out how since I mostly use it through my email at work anyway.
They also really need to add the find same photo from Picassa desktop app to the photos
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It migrated to hangouts, but hangouts seems to be a dead app that crashes on my phones now (I get a notification, but can't use it on two phones).
Still "works" on my Moto E2. It doesn't work that well, though. It drops most of my calls in mid-sentence.
Is there still Google Voice? is it part of Hangouts? Was it wrapped into Google+ and that's why it died?
Maybe try installing the Voice app and see? It still exists, and it seems to work OK. For some reason you can't use both Voice and Hangouts to do SMS though. I never did understand that. Still don't.
They also really need to add the find same photo from Picassa desktop app to the photos website. It's terribly annoying to know they have the tech from image search and don't let me use it.
Tried Googles or Lens on your phone?
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I don't want to be able to search for things based on my photos (like lens).
I want to be able to find duplicates of the same image in my account.
Example:
My moto migrate copied all photos from phone A to phone B but updated the created date.
It then puts them into my google photos account, all of them at that day, but also they exist when I took them. I then smashed that phone's screen and the same thing happened, but on a different date.
I'd like to be able to go into a dedupe mode, and go through and keep on
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Thanks, I was unaware of that.
It worked so well in hangouts for so long I thought they pushed me over from a death of voice.
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The ones I miss and don’t miss (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, it would be nice if Slashdot linked to the actual web page [killedbygoogle.com] instead of to an ad-infested article.
Looking over the list, the one I miss the most is iGoogle; this allowed one to have a home page with news from other pages all grouped together. Many people miss Google Reader, an RSS client, but the glory days of RSS are long gone.
Google Chrome Frame is no longer needed; it was a product for an era when a web designer's job was 90% making their web page look decent in Internet Explorer and 10% actu
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Re: The ones I miss and don’t miss (Score:2)
I miss Aardvark [wikipedia.org]. It was magnificently useful.
Tho I kinda suspect - based on Aardvark's former userbase - that Google didn't so much shut it down, but rather sold it to Uncle Sam for private use.
Most of them deserved death (Score:3)
Google Flu: You REALLY needed that, right? When you scroll through the list, most of them you've never heard of. For good reason. Most of them were useless or done better by other products
Google Cemetery (Score:2)
There is also the Google Cemetery [gcemetery.co] web site.
While some of these were experimental in nature, and had a small population of users, it is a joke how a large company like Google kills so many products and services, even ones that have substantial number of users.
Google Reader, Google+, goo.gl URL shortner, Google Wave, Google Code, and on an on an on ...
How do they feel now that Microsoft owns github, the most used code repository and sharing web site? They could have had a viable competitor.
no Froogle? (Score:3, Interesting)
what's next big target? (Score:2)
Android seems to be next big target? Google Chrome OS following? Both replaced by Fuckya,,,ehem...Fuchsia?
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prod the other telcos to roll out faster internet
In that sense it failed. They just rolled out Ajit Pai.
Sad Day For Inbox (Score:2)
Since they announced its impending death... I have been searching for a replacement and never found one. I tried dozens of apps and webservices... but none of them did what Inbox could do.
The best I've settled on right now is using normal GMail with the "Multiple Inboxes" option and really specific queries set up to fill each Inbox. That gives me 5 "Google Inbox" style inboxes... and then everything else just gets jumbled together.
It works ok - but I assume they'll even remove that option at some point :-
Why I don't trust the new Google game streaming (Score:1)
Early adopter of many google 'projects' only to be killed and booted off many times over. I have a feeling the games service will be no different unless they partner with some big games publishers.
Google sets (Score:2)
WHY so many underperforming Google products? (Score:2)
Because Google’s massive kill ratio makes users reluctant to try those products in the first place. Who wants to learn a newly introduced product that might summarily vanish tomorrow?
Google is like the Fox network (Score:2)
Google does to released software what the Fox TV network did to television programs.
Firefly, meet your new brother in exile: Inbox.