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The Google Cemetery – A list of dead Google products and why they died

• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• the_duke 8y ago
  I know we bash Google for discontinuing services here a lot. I definitely bemoaned the demise of Google Reader. But if this list is complete, it's really not so bad, considering the size and age of Google.
  • LeonB 8y ago
    At Wikipedia I think there’s a few more not currently listed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google... ...and I suspect there’s many that aren’t listed at Wikipedia.
    • mikejb 8y ago
      Probably, but this leads down the rabbit hole on "what counts as discontinued". There's probably plenty that got killed internally before seeing a public user. Some on the Wikipedia list were more like features within a product (e.g. Latitude), some of them just morphed into products directly (e.g. real-time search, I think), and some of them were not really in a 'launched' state (e.g. Image Swirl).
  • mikejb 8y ago
    I agree with you, and in my opinion Reader was the most used and most useful product on that list. Most other discontinued products were indeed underutilized (for various reasons) or outpaced by their competitors. But TBH, there are some products I wouldn't mind seeing on that list (Allo being one of them).
    • dankohn1 8y ago
      If you liked Google Reader, please give Inoreader a try. It's a nearly perfect clone but with useful features like filtering and following Twitter feeds.
      • xellisx 8y ago
        I ended up going to TheOldReader, I'll have to check that out.
    • macspoofing 8y ago
      >But TBH, there are some products I wouldn't mind seeing on that list (Allo being one of them). Really? Allo is(was) a great little chat app. Why would anyone hate it apart from the fact it is yet another chat application.
      • mikejb 8y ago
        > Why would anyone hate it apart from the fact it is yet another chat application. It's not that I hate Allo, I just prefer Hangouts. That might seem orthogonal, but a part of me worries that at some point in the future Hangouts will be deprecated in favor of Allo.
        • macspoofing 8y ago
          Allo is in maintenance mode. The entire Allo team has been moved over to Android Messages. Hangouts is also in maintenance mode. The 'Hangouts' branding has been repositioned to their slack-type productivity tool. Like Allo, what you know as Hangouts is dead.
  • levesque 8y ago
    Also, consider that several of these services still exist in one form or another.
  • cribbles 8y ago
    I agree with you. This list actually had the opposite intended effect on me. Yeah, Reader should have stuck around. But half of these I've either never heard of or only faintly remember. And the ones I do remember seem like reasonable axes. Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?" So Google's huge and had to cut off some redundant services over the years. So what. In view of privacy violations, military tech collaborations, and so on, EOL-ing a couple dozen services is hardly a cardinal sin.
    • sergiosgc 8y ago
      > Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?" Google Video predated the Youtube acquisition. For me it was a marker of how very large companies suck at innovation. Here was Google, having their lunch stolen by a startup, in epic fashion.
      • mikepurvis 8y ago
        Google Video was also better technically in basically every way— the audio/video sync was better (I preferred it for posting short swing dancing clips), encoding was faster, and seeking and mid-video permalinks were better. Plus, I believe GV had a live streaming feature first. YouTube still won, largely for the social/commenting/vlogging features, which is part of why it was such a big deal when YouTube users became the basis of Google+ (with its real name policy).
        • lloydde 8y ago
          YouTube both won and lost, because it was a startup operating in the legal grey zone. It was long before most content was commercial content, commercials, music videos or other professional content most often clips or full videos of content people did not own copyright for. Sure, many people want to share their amateur content on the island with the most inhabitants. Neither Google other rivals or other startups had the gumption and survivor instinct to play this hand. If Google was the host or already owned YouTube when the DRM issues emerged and were being negotiated the copyright owners would have come after Google even harder, faster and more expensively. I say YouTube lost, because they needed to sell. When Google bought YouTube the business model and risks were better known. Months after Google purchased YouTube Viacom famously sued. By that point publishers were seeing benefits along with the costs.
  • HugoDaniel 8y ago
    Google died when they killed reader. I think back then they had a very good chance to outgrow facebook and lead the "open web" forward. Instead they went all in with G+ and its early variants. Now they have to work with facebook to index its content.
    • jannes 8y ago
      Google died? A strange thing to say about a company with a market capitalisation of 722 billion USD.
      • FeralAlien 8y ago
        Eh a dying whale is still dying. Google missed the cloud and is next in line for the privacy burner (see Facebook) they arent even in the top 3 by market value anymore.
        • emptyfile 8y ago
          Facebook is dead too? Outside of top 3 by market value = "dead"?
      • HugoDaniel 8y ago
        https://ycharts.com/companies/IBM/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/IBM/market_cap
        • praneshp 8y ago
          Is there a reason you linked ibm here? Please elaborate for the not so smart.
          • throwaway2048 8y ago
            a "dead" company can last a very, very long time. By measure of "cool kid technological fore-runner" IBM has been dead since the early 80s. Or perhaps more hilariously: http://excite.com/ http://excite.com/ reminder that google wanted to sell to excite.com for $750,000, excite.com said no. https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/
  • ppeetteerr 8y ago
    I don't think this list is complete. Inbox is not here, and neither are the multitude of Android apps that Google kept rolling out and discontinuing (e.g. Allo).
    • Thaxll 8y ago
      But Inbox got integrated into Gmail.
      • vkazanov 8y ago
        So who cares? Inbox was good because it was not Gmail, not because Gmail lacked features from it.
        • izacus 8y ago
          In what way?
          • fingerlocks 8y ago
            I think it’s the UI mostly. It’s nice having all your messages categorized in bundles, grouped chronologically, then sorted by priority. With Inbox I find that I skim through way less crap to find emails that need attention.
          • chrisfosterelli 8y ago
            The interface on Inbox is _much_ less cluttered. I spent an hour turning off things in gmail trying to clean it up after the announcement, and it still looks too busy. Other specific features are missing that help with email fatigue. As far as I know, there's no way for me to tell gmail to group a set of emails together and only alert / show them to me once per day at a certain time, like you can with Inbox. I can't create custom bundles to hide large groups of emails I don't want to accidentally bury other content (without actually removing them from the inbox). Gmail kind of has the "tabbed inbox", but you can't configure the categories with the flexibility that bundles had. In Inbox, I feel like I can control how much email interrupts me without also missing anything important. I don't get this same feeling with gmail. The Inbox product as a whole had a strong focus on trying to reduce the interruption of your email and keep your inbox clean. While gmail has taken in some of the features, it hasn't absorbed the core goal of the project.
  • sdenton4 8y ago
    Indeed. I often think there's a lot of confirmation bias in the 'google kills products' complaints... Certainly many many small to medium sized, user-facing start ups have died in the same time, but we don't hear the same sort of FUD about using start up tech.
    • elkos 8y ago
      But you know Google is not a startup.
  • apetrovic 8y ago
    Google killed Google Reader because of Google+, if I remember correctly. To push people towards the new platform, where stories should be shared. Well... that worked.
    • finchisko 8y ago
      Now killing G+, they can resurrect GReader :D
    • jddj 8y ago
      The irony for me is that if a company wanted to construct a strong profile of me to sell me ads, I'd have to imagine that Feedly (I switched to Feedly when Google Reader was retired) would now be one of the best placed to do that. I spend far more of my personal time there than in any other app.
  • sixothree 8y ago
    It is missing the disappearance of "don't be evil."
    • r87 8y ago
      This is a popular meme for some reason, but "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right - speak up!" is literally the last line in the code of conduct.
      • trhway 8y ago
        Didnt Damore do just that? (I mean for his definition of "isn't right", yet isnt that the point?)
        • r87 8y ago
          I mean, that's the point of why the code of conduct was expanded from just "don't be evil". Everyone's definition of evil is different.
    • trhway 8y ago
      It was a feature not a product.
  • neuronexmachina 8y ago
    IMHO, Google really should have evolved Reader into Google Plus. They were already part of the way there with Reader's Buzz features.
  • sys_64738 8y ago
    Google Reader is sadly missed but a few worthy alternatives cropped up. What this clubbing of Reader taught many people is that out with a few select services (GMail and Search), everything else will be clobbered eventually so don't rely on Google tools in the long term.
  • reaperducer 8y ago
    Unfortunately, the list is not complete. But it's useful to demonstrate to the boss that Google isn't ready for enterprise yet.
  • ehsankia 8y ago
    Not only that, but even then, half of these are super obscure projects even people in Hackernews, which are generally more tech knowledgeable, have never heard of. Who here knows what Dodgeball, Jaiku, Sidewiki or Fast Flip were? Hell, to be honest, even within the valley, I often meet people that don't even know what more "popular" products like Wave or iGoogle were.
  • telltruth 8y ago
    Normally companies retire products because they are lightly used or have fallen far behind competition. Google kills stuff on whims. Google Reader, url shortner, code search, Picasa - all these are terrible examples of things that got shutdown. All these has real consequences. Other day I was looking to buy a movie and it was available on Amazon as well as YouTube, I went to Amazon because YouTube feels much more likely to shutdown it’s movie business on a whim while Amazon will likely fight out to last moment. Same goes for buying music.
  • tokyodude 8y ago
    The list is also a little unfair. Latitude didn't die, it's just a renamed and built into Google Maps. Picasa is also questionable. Google Photos does more and I end up using it more than I used Picasa. Google Talk. I guess I don't know what was lost. A chat box still appears in Gmail. Google Video seems replaced by youtube and google drive. Google Gears was subsumed into web standards. In other words the list is padded IMO. Services that actually shut down like Wave for Google+ or Reader are in a different category than services who just became part of some other product.
  • spc476 8y ago
    Microsoft has also discontinued a lot of programs over its life, but there's one major difference---I can still use those Microsoft programs! Microsoft long ago stopped supporting MS-DOS 2.1 but I can still use it. Heck, I even have a verion of PC-DOS 1.0 around here somewhere. But the discontinuations at Google? Gone gone gone. I can't even keep a copy around for my own use. That's one reason why I dislike web applications.
• jansan 8y ago
  Remember Google Code Search? That was a great feature of Google search. You could search for swear words in all the code available worldwide. In one (Sun Microsystems?) code there was a comment "The user is a wanker. He cannot remember his password." The old days were much more fun.
  • marbu 8y ago
    Yes, google code search was a great service. One could use regular expressions and limit the search to particular language or license. Moreover it indexed code from any tarball or repository google bot run into, so the sheer size of data one was searching was hard for others to match.
  • tim333 8y ago
    This has a similar comment. Gnome Display Manager http://rc.quest.com/viewvc/gdm/vendor/gnome/daemon/slave.c?diff_format=s&view=markup&sortby=date&sortdir=down&pathrev=4 http://rc.quest.com/viewvc/gdm/vendor/gnome/daemon/slave.c?d...
    • jansan 8y ago
      Yes, that may be it. Great find! And sorry to Sun Microsystems, it wasn't you this time.
    • nerdponx 8y ago
      /* evil! how this this happen */ \ 239 if (slave_start_jmp_error_to_print != NULL) \ 240 gdm_error (slave_start_jmp_error_to_print); \ 241 gdm_error ("Bad (very very VERY bad!) things happening in signal"); \ 242 _exit (DISPLAY_REMANAGE); \ 243 } I'd hate to be the poor soul who encounters this error message and finds no information about it except the source code.
      • arghwhat 8y ago
        It will only occur if everything is so irrevocably on fire that you need to debug a lot of code anyway, at which point the error message is useless. Specifically, the branch is only reachable if the PID is not what was expected, or the location that the macro was supposed to longjmp to is not set, which would be fatal defects.
• ashelmire 8y ago
  If this is your site; the reasons only come up when clicking the rather small images, though it looks like clicking anywhere in the “cards” should do this. (On mobile).
  • nashashmi 8y ago
    I'm seeing it a little differently. Clicking anywhere in the card works.
  • johnchristopher 8y ago
    On desktop it's triggered when hovering over the tombstone.
• nashashmi 8y ago
  Really amazing how many products were merged into Google+ and superceded. And then also how many products were sunsetted in favor of putting more development time into Google+. And then Google+ was sunsetted and machine learning and other built in features are doing a better job of prospering than any other Google properties. Google was always a nerd company. Creating social platforms was always an SMH move.
• maaaats 8y ago
  Would be cool if it also explained what some of these services were.
• m12k 8y ago
  Neat! Maybe you could add a line or two to describe what each product was? For example I'd never heard about Sidewiki, Google Jaiku or Google Catalogs. It seems fitting that a tombstone would mention not just the date of death but also a bit about who they were and what they did.
  • DanSmooth 8y ago
    And if the postings are still online perhaps link to the official "obituaries".
  • codyogden 8y ago
    https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com <- Mini-obits galore.
    • joshuamorton 8y ago
      This list annoys me. Reading it, some of those still exist, many we're just folded into other services, and a couple appear to have been 20% projects that were never Google's to kill.
  • xtracto 8y ago
    You might enjoy this other site that has the original google graveyard: https://www.wordstream.com/articles/retired-google-projects https://www.wordstream.com/articles/retired-google-projects
  • ehsankia 8y ago
    +1 It's worth noting that even as someone who frequents tech and hackernews frequently, I still didn't know what half the stuff on there was. Things like Dodgeball, Jaiku, Gears, Fast Flip, Urchin or Aardvark. Never even heard these names before.
• Jyaif 8y ago
  What annoys me the most is that they have the right ideas (Waves, Helpouts), but they lack conviction. The most ridicoulous example is when they introduced wireless charging, then removed it, and then added it back when Apple finally added it themselves. They also sometimes lack imaginations, namely cancelling Reader instead of morphing it into some sort of G+. That plus AMP would have given FB a run for their money.
  • chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Reader + YouTube + Wave === (possible) FB Killer. Maybe it's because their goto is analytics and "how can monetize this?" instead of "what do users want? what do they need?" Both of these had a sizable user-base that would have been leveraged, as opposed to G+ starting from zero.
• s9w 8y ago
  What about Google Goggles?
  • SquareWheel 8y ago
    Which one? The photo app that read QR codes and such, or the Gmail Labs feature which asked you math questions before letting you send mail?
    • s9w 8y ago
      I only know the old android app
  • DannyBee 8y ago
    It was integrated into something, I forget what
    • tdeck 8y ago
      There is Google Lens now which to me looks like the same concept.
  • izacus 8y ago
    Doesn't Lens (part of Assistant on your phone) cover all use cases now?
• cemetarypost2 8y ago
  Gmail: at its peak it had 1.2 billion users. The product management team was replaced with [people who unfortunately are not qualified to hold their position.] (I imagine), and they thought it's a good idea to replace the desktop version with an unusable one that took literally 15 seconds to 1 minute to open, would not load completely, hung on searches for mail, reported actions as finished that did not make it across the network, and was slow as unusable. Later the team thought it was a good idea to simply blindly cc people on mail who it thought might be interested in seeing mail you're sending (previously only a suggestion, which was fine), such as cc-ing your boss when you send your resume/CV somewhere (since you cc your boss on lots of things) while hiding the fact that it was doing so, not reporting the mail as sent while actually sending it, and other shenanigans. It also thought security wasn't important anymore and would link accounts that had nothing to do with each other, so that you could just access anyone's inbox. it would replace some text you sent with different text based on machine learning. just an all around shambles. after people realized that they werne't getting what they signed up for, they started looking at different providers for the first time in 15 years. R.I.P. Gmail. The service was finally shuttered in 2020 after an exodus of nearly 90% of its users. just kidding. Hey Google: [terminate] all your GMail product managers because they're [not qualified or able to perform in their current position] and ruining it for everyone. You know you can just [terminate people who are not performing adequately in their position], right? --- EDIT: this was flagged while going up and down and up and down in points. I've now replaced the parts in brackets with neutral language, previously it was expressed strongly and colloquially.
  • maaaats 8y ago
    Yeah, what's up with Gmail not loading lately (in Firefox). Opening a mail takes ages, and often it's not marked as read when I return later.
    • cemetarypost2 8y ago
      >what's up with Gmail not loading lately I just wrote you what's up: >The product management team was replaced with people [who unfortunately are not qualified to hold their position.] (I imagine) I also wrote the solution: >Hey Google: : [terminate] all your GMail product managers because they're [not qualified or able to perform in their current position] and ruining it for everyone. You know you can just [terminate people who are not performing adequately in their position], right? It's rare that a fix like this is so easy and decisive. So easy. I'm absolutely serious. - I've edited the comment for more neutral language (previously it was colloquial.)
• Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
  Google Map Maker: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker
• mikejb 8y ago
  Slightly (un)related, at Google X they seem to have an interesting way to select what projects they pursue and which not: Whenever they get an idea about a project, they try to kill the idea as fast as possible. Astro Teller talked about this in an interview with Adam Savage: https://youtu.be/UErbxoBhWoM?t=414 https://youtu.be/UErbxoBhWoM?t=414
• owaislone 8y ago
  Can't help but think how many services were stopped in order to build those features in G+ which eventually failed as well. At least we got Google Photos out of it which seems to be a great app. Hope it lives long enough.
• deytempo 8y ago
  I might be just tired but I didn’t see google finance stock screener in there
• max_sendfeld 8y ago
  How about Google Glass? In all fairness though, quite a few are only dead as standalone products but have merged into other offerings. Take Google Gears for example - offline storage, worker threads and other APIs for browsers, all of which is now part of regular Chrome.
  • stewartbutler 8y ago
    Glass is still around and under active development, it just isn't a consumer product. It is in use by several enterprises, mostly factories and warehouses. My read on it is that it was never intended to be a consumer project as soon as they launched it (which explains the lack of polish), but the high level of interest when it was announced convinced them to launch it as one just in case they had stumbled on the next big thing. When that failed to materialize, they dropped it back to a research and enterprise project as was initially intended.
• AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  Tango should definitely be on this list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_(platform)
  • wartakode 8y ago
    PowerMeter too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_PowerMeter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_PowerMeter
  • mcklaw 8y ago
    Tango was technically discontinue but in fact it was replaced by ARCore, so "discontinued" seems inaccurate for me...
• xyphoid 8y ago
  Google bought Bitium slightly more than a year ago. Exactly a year after the acquisition they notified they were discontinuing service for us - it sounds like it was a straight acquihire and shutdown for their identity platform. Migrating our whole corp password management to a new platform right during the busy time of year has been a nightmare.
• andreiursan 8y ago
  I would also add to the list radio ads https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/technology/companies/13google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/technology/companies/13go...
• erikig 8y ago
  The Google Products Wikipedia page is also a great resource for this as well as a history of the missions, founders, acquisitions etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
• princetman 8y ago
  Even after 5+ years, I still miss Google Reader almost everyday. Just pure simplicity and tight community around sharing is yet to be matched IMO. Web has moved on and as someone commented here, it’s walled garden everywhere now. Thank you Google of yore for creating and running a great service for as long as you did!
  • nolok 8y ago
    Ehh, the old reader has scratched that itch for me ever since. And I like that it's a company dedicated to it rather than an irrelevant side product of a much larger company that doesn't really care about it, since it's a large part of my weekly life.
    • princetman 8y ago
      Not to my taste. I guess you must use some App to read the feed? I just launched home page on the phone and it’s far from ideal. Take a look at this screenshot. https://ibb.co/hwFJXA https://ibb.co/hwFJXA Would love to know what’s your setup on the go.
      • zimpenfish 8y ago
        Feedbin is pretty good on mobile Safari (although I normally read it via Reeder 3) - https://ibb.co/eCZR2A https://ibb.co/eCZR2A
      • simongr3dal 8y ago
        If you're on iOS then Reeder[1] is a pretty good choice, because it supports a lot of different sync services[2]. The app isn't updated all that often, but then again, it doesn't really need it. [1]: http://www.reederapp.com http://www.reederapp.com [2]: https://ibb.co/h008HA https://ibb.co/h008HA
  • tannhaeuser 8y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding why Google has been criticized wrt Reader. The problem was that Google first ruined the RSS ecosystem, then pulled out of it and tried to lead users elsewhere, leaving torched earth behind.
• ryanmarsh 8y ago
  This is why I use AWS.
• h4l0 8y ago
  Google Spaces lived for so short, it is not included in the list and so far nobody has mentioned it in the comments. It was a product that me and my friends have long thought of. I think if it were implemented in a way that focused on chat but not on shared links, it could have been a success. I still believe that niche future will find its way into a popular chat application.
  • codyogden 8y ago
    https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com <- It's on the list. :) Only lived nine months. :(
• charkubi 8y ago
  Ironic there's an option to share the article on Google Plus.
  • mcv 8y ago
    It's not dead yet. They're gonna pull the plug next August.
• ernsheong 8y ago
  For companies that continue to innovate, product failures and deprecations are only to be expected. It's not unlike startups that fail for all sorts of reasons? I'd be more worried if Google tried to do everything. We're human and finite, after all.
• starboy1996 8y ago
  Google Inbox?
  • eumenides1 8y ago
    March 2019. So it's in palliative care and has a DNR. I like Inbox still. I was using gmail like i was using inbox before the product existed. Oh well, when you live on the edge, sometimes you get cut. guitar riff
    • andraskindler 8y ago
      There's still time. I recently forced myself to switch back to GMail, but it's not the same.
• bradleyjg 8y ago
  GWT is, if not dead, at least in a deliberately induced coma. And unlike some of the other items it wasn’t a consumer product, it was a heavily evangelized framework that companies and developers invested in and then were left high and dry.
  • p_l 8y ago
    GWT is still alive though I think mostly forked by now, and used mostly in Enterprise systems, not fancy-shmancy world of startups and SFBA.
  • stickfigure 8y ago
    GWT users are doing ok. Yeah development is slow compared to when they had a bazillion engineers working on it during the Wave era... on the other hand, that's when a lot of the overengineered crap got added. In the mean time, standard browser changes like source maps have really helped over the old days of browser plugins. GWT is a web presentation technology that has (so far) had a 12-year run. That's like a million dog years. Backbone is 8 years old, Ember is 6 years old, Angular1 was a flash in the pan... jQuery is the same age as GWT, but it's waning as well. I really don't think GWT devs have much to complain about. React developers should be so lucky in another ten years. Frontend technologies just don't have much shelf life.
    • bradleyjg 8y ago
      > on the other hand, that's when a lot of the overengineered crap got added. People wrote stuff on top of each one of those “overengineered crap” pivots. It’s nice that a transpiler still sort-of exists but that’s of little use to people that built out products on the platform. And of course the back-compat story has always been terrible because google. Also it’s was a java framework pitched at java developers. Swing is still supported and applets were fully supported (not hived off to some moribund open source foundation) for more than twenty years.
      • stickfigure 8y ago
        That overengineered crap still works? I mean, it was never a necessary part of gwt. There are a bunch of crappy react patterns you could use and we don't blame the core libray. Personally I think redux is overdue for a reckoning. I was doing gwt development in the wave era. I saw all the crazy new mvvpvmvwhatever stuff and just avoided it. App worked great. I don't use gwt today but I keep an eye on it every now and then. The transpiler is waaaaaay better now than it was in the wave era. The only thing missing is a modern widget framework. I don't expect gwt to make a major comeback, but it wouldn't surprise me too much of it did. It (still) does a few things far better than the current crop of JS frameworks.
• nolok 8y ago
  I miss surprisingly few of those, notebook and picasa basically. Could have missed Reader but it was replaced by the theoldreader almost overnight thanks to advices here (I wasn't a community user but a solo one so I did not miss the features that may not have been replicated). I think the bigger issue is the features google removed or modified from some of its products; like my biggest miss is true verbatim search.
  • FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
    Of all the things Google has killed, I really miss Notebook. It was nimble and lightweight, while Docs is bloated and drags my old machine down (not to mention my crappy internet connection). Around 2001, Google had a nifty toll free phone service, kind of like 411, but better. You it was an early voice recognition system that would even connect your call to the business you were trying to find. I think it was called Jupiter, but a cursory search doesn't turn up anything. I miss that too.
    • tdeck 8y ago
      Google Keep is basically Notebook with a mobile-focused design. It's so odd to me that they killed that product and then made an entirely new one a few years later with the same feature set.
    • Godel_unicode 8y ago
      Goog-411 was awesome in the days before smartphones. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
  • nerdponx 8y ago
    It would have been nice if they sold Picasa instead of just killing it. I would have probably paid $20 for a Picasa license.
• crusso 8y ago
  Google Wave is the one that stands out on that list for me. It was such a fantastic and ambitious idea, but the execution was so buggy that it was basically unusable.
  • theon144 8y ago
    Yeah, Wave for what it's worth, seemed like the future at that time. But it never really even took off.
  • chiefalchemist 8y ago
    That, and they were stingy with invites. That is, unless your whole team had invites it was completely useless as team tool. Wave was everything Slack __still__ isn't.
    • your-nanny 8y ago
      the invites really worked for Gmail; generated lots of buzz. Invites have not worked so well since.
      • chiefalchemist 8y ago
        Yeah. But Gmail isn't a team tool.
        • your-nanny 8y ago
          nor a walled garden social medium.
          • anticensor 8y ago
            GMail is one of the two tools of Google with real use, other being the web search. All other tools are impermanent.
      • kybernetikos 8y ago
        You could send and receive email with a gmail user without being a gmail user - in fact it made people jealous to do so and was great advertising. You couldn't participate in a wave unless you were on wave. (The spec was open, but obviously in the early days there were no other implementers. Also the non-open UI made a big difference). I really thought they were going to fold wave into gmail, so that everyone on gmail would automatically be able to participate in waves and access them through the same interface as they did their emails. That would have been amazing. It was also just outgrowing its initial crashiness when they killed it.
• chiefalchemist 8y ago
  re: Google Wave "why dead? - Google Wave was discontinued because there just weren’t enough active users. The IP was later transferred to Apache when the development was discontinued." Kinda. But more accurately, there weren't enough active users because Google __completely__ botched the beta. In restricting the invites then prevented already establish groups for trying it. For example, if you have a group of 4 or 5 and not as many invites, it was no go. Keep in mind, Wave was pre-Slack. The market was there. It was primed. It was waiting for something smart and collaborative. Yet Google did the one thing you don't want to do with a team-centric tool...intentionally leave out at least one team member.
  • glup 8y ago
    I was extremely fond of Wave when it came out, but remember few people I knew shared that view. Now I am trying to think back to Wave and how it differed from Slack... wasn’t it pretty similar?
    • nailer 8y ago
      Also Dodgeball was the predecessor to Foursquare. There's a lot of wasted opportunities here.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • chiefalchemist 8y ago
      I'm fuzzy as well but afaik Wave had threaded / hierarchical comments. The way they did allowed for new threads to be spun off. It better reflected how conversations happen and knowledge is collected, related to other knowledge, etc. It also had a replay feature. So if you had someone jump in the middle of a discussion, they could rewind, replay and see how it happened. As subtle as that might seem just queues and context help understand - the knowledge and the people / group. Those were what I remember thinking "this is The One" only to see them walk away too soon.
    • chiefalchemist 8y ago
• asaph 8y ago
  > In October 2018, Google announced that it was shutting down Google+ for consumers, citing low user engagement and a software error. I wouldn't characterize it as a "software error". It was a security vulnerability.[0] [0] https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-strobe/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-s...
  • mihaifm 8y ago
    Thanks, didn’t even know G+ was shutting down. Guess I better tell my mom, she’s just started using it, the low user count is actually a good feature for her, doesn’t like the “noisiness” of other platforms
  • ehsankia 8y ago
    I also don't know if it should be on the list since it hasn't shut down yet. There's a 10 month sunset period. By that same logic it should include Inbox, which it doesn't, because that's also in a sunset period. EDIT: Also, only the consumer side is shutting down. G+ for G-Suite will still exist.
• dakics 8y ago
  + Panoramio
• tooltalk 8y ago
  Was Diane Greene's Bebop which Google acquired for $380M in 2016, ever productized? or is it still work-in-progress?
  • karp773 8y ago
    Seems like it's become Google Hire https://hire.google.com/ https://hire.google.com/ .
• hardwaresofton 8y ago
  Alternate (likely open) domain name: googlotha (pun on Golgotha).
  • bananadonkey 8y ago
    How about `googolgotha`? Feels easier to pronounce.
• darren_ 8y ago
  A somethingawful YOSPOS person had a similar idea years ago and made https://didgoogleshutdown.com/ https://didgoogleshutdown.com/ (unfortunately it hasn't updated in a while and said SA poster may not have had the best insight into google product lifetimes)
• crazygringo 8y ago
  Google+ is listed as the first item... but it's still around... It was only discontinued for consumers. It's still part of paid G Suite, it just focuses on sharing posts and topics within a company now -- something it's actually pretty good at. [1] I wouldn't call it a "dead Google product" by any means. [1] https://gsuite.google.com/products/googleplus/ https://gsuite.google.com/products/googleplus/
  • your-nanny 8y ago
    I still get g+ feeds. so when is it being discontinued for consumers?
    • lostgame 8y ago
      August, AFAIK.
• bananatron 8y ago
  RIP Inbox
• tkyjonathan 8y ago
  I miss igoogle...
• your-nanny 8y ago
  i wish this site gave a brief summary of each product in addition to info on its demise. don't know many of them
• karp773 8y ago
  There area still many more Google products which are effectively buried alive down the level and levels of menus. I find it puzzling and ironic how difficult it is to find a Google product. They should have a Google product search somewhere in the apps menu in the browser. Also, next to zero marketing.
• CodeBytes 8y ago
  Neat idea. What's the criteria? Just it seems to be missing Google Code. Had a look on Wikipedia and seems to be a lot missing from that too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
• texmex20 8y ago
  I'd like to hear what the "lessons learned" were for each of these. And how did these dead products help shape future products that were perhaps more successful.
• IBM 8y ago
  Here's another site that someone on Something Awful made. https://didgoogleshutdown.com/ https://didgoogleshutdown.com/
• dwighttk 8y ago
  What percentage are messaging apps?
  • mrweasel 8y ago
    It's weird that for a company to desperate to enter the messaging app market, they have yet to just clone iMessage. There's a ton of people who have come to depend on iOS, simply because of iMessage. The best they've been able to come up with is some weird half-backed Android Messages or SMS Connect, it's not really clear. It's weird that they don't just take the ideas from iMessage and run with it.
    • dwighttk 8y ago
      I think it is because Apple had to twist AT&Ts arm to the breaking point to make iMessage work that way and then each carrier they added they had to force the issue again. Verizon turned them down because Apple wasn’t going to let them install crap and charge 10¢ (Or whatever) per iMessage in addition to SMS. Google would have to convince all their hardware partners to do that carrier arm-twisting themselves and most those companies don’t have any leverage to do it even if they wanted.
      • mrweasel 8y ago
        Interesting, I did not know that. Out side the US market I think not supporting iMessage would be suicide for the carriers. If iMessage wasn't supported by one carrier, people would just switch. Maybe it helps that most carriers here have had unlimited SMS for a fix low fee for almost ten years.
• goodmachine 8y ago
  Nice. These tombstones need a "more" button where links, discussion, lessons learned and a proper obituary can be found. Worth noting that the brand (and ethical vision) have also died and been reborn. Last thing: it would also be interesting to see if the death rate is increasing or declining over time: a higher death rate indicates a healthy org still experimenting.
  • thrower123 8y ago
    At least a sentence or two explaining what the service even was. I vaguely remember most of these, but there are many that don't ring any bells at all.
  • codyogden 8y ago
    I love the death rate over time chart. Might add that to https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
• asaph 8y ago
  Though not a product per-se, Google Instant Search was a significant enough feature that I think it merits inclusion in the list. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857120
• donatj 8y ago
  Oh man, I forgot about Google 411. I loved that and used it all the time before I had a smartphone.
• thrower123 8y ago
  Gmail is about due to be put on this list. They have made the web UI unusable for no good reason, and driven me back to an old-school desktop mail client.
  • neysofu 8y ago
    I can't use the new web UI for my life. The HTMl view is great though and loads very fast.
    • iscrewyou 8y ago
      What HTML view?? How do I access it?
  • lostgame 8y ago
    I'm not sure why companies are so insistent sometimes on doing UI/UX overhauls that nobody asked for. At least Mojave has the option for a dark or light UI/UX. Tons of older/less experienced people use Gmail. It's hard enough for those kinds of people to get used to a UI/UX to start.
• michalu 8y ago
  It's missing some services like Google Offers a Groupon competitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Offers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Offers and Google Reader ... from the top of my head, and some enterprise products if I am not mistaken
• alwaysreading 8y ago
  RIP Reader
• mythrwy 8y ago
  Google App inventor? (guess it's still around, got transferred to MIT).
• brownbat 8y ago
  Some of these I don't remember, and a couple I actually thought I was still using. :) The Dodgeball saga seems like a good case study: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/eric-schmidt-google-dodgeball-foursquare/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/eric-schmidt-google-dodgeb... It's as if Google is simply too big to realize what a good idea is and support it. Ads made Google one of the most profitable companies in the world basically overnight. No one's passion project will ever look good against that measuring stick.
• adventured 8y ago
  You could safely add Freebase (by Metaweb) to the list of things Google killed.
• jimmaswell 8y ago
  It's unfortunate they made the free edition of sketchup only a web app from now on. At least you can still get older desktop versions.
  • EvanAnderson 8y ago
    SketchUp isn't a Google property anymore. They sold it to Trimble in 2012.
    • jimmaswell 8y ago
      Wow, never knew that after using it for years.
• petilon 8y ago
  I would like to see a similar list for Apple. I think Apple's list would be shorter, because Apple releases fewer products.
  • zimpenfish 8y ago
    They acqui-killed DeskConnect (in the process of acqui-hiring Workflow) which was an astonishingly useful cross-platform AirDrop-alike. https://deskconnect.com/ https://deskconnect.com/
  • ac29 8y ago
    Depends if you include individual hardware lines - remember Apple has been around for 20+ years longer than Google. If you include each individual product, Apple discontinued far more products before Google was even founded than are on the entire Google list (which is admittedly incomplete): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._product...
  • thejohnconway 8y ago
    Apple as discontinued a fair number of software products, just off the top of my head: Aperture Shake Sherlock iSync ClarisWorks/AppleWorks (iWork seems to be a different beast) HyperCard WebObjects iDVD iChat (iMessage was never an AIM client)
• betandr 8y ago
  Mentioned a couple of times but it's still raw that Inbox has been canned too. Also the Googlers I know use it and Gmail is some ways back although it has been improved. It's been the best thing to happen to email forever, IMO, and I'll really miss it!
  • fredley 8y ago
    God yes, I will miss Inbox hard. I have started trying out Spark, and it's sort of ok but there's really nothing out there with such a tight focus as Inbox. Gmail on the web is just awful, and perhaps that was one of Inbox's greatest strengths - it was fast and bloat-free where Gmail is decidedly not.
• jordigh 8y ago
  I hope the Data Liberation Front, while not exactly a "product", lives a long and prosper life for as long as Google hoards our data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front They were quite helpful in getting about a decade worth of gmail data out of there when I decided I didn't want to use gmail anymore.
  • jankeymeulen 8y ago
    It's required for GDPR so will stay around for a while. (That's my personal guess at least, not related to that team)
• Animats 8y ago
  Then there are zombies, like Google Voice and Google Fiber. They're not dead, but they're in maintenance mode, not being improved or extended.
  • bayouborne 8y ago
    - yep, Atlanta here, Google Fiber needs to be added to this list.
  • miguelmota 8y ago
    from my experience, Google Voice has worked just fine the way it is for many years and it doesn't necessary need shiny new features. Would be sad if they discontinued it
    • Animats 8y ago
      There was supposed to be a Google Voice API. Never happened.
• Etheryte 8y ago
  Missing from the list are the many, many competing products & services Google bought and then promptly shut down.
  • codyogden 8y ago
    https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com <- Meebo, Sparrow, Grand Central, Writely, and many more. :(
    • mhfs 8y ago
      Oh Sparrow. The only email client I ever really loved.
• IvyMike 8y ago
  I feel like there should be an honorable mention for Google Groups/Dejanews. I mean, I guess usenet search is still there, but it's a shadow of its former usefulness.
  • ajmurmann 8y ago
    People keep mentioning Google Groups. I've been using it at everywhere workplace I can think of, since many years. Most internal mailing lists get set up via it. Did it use to do more?
    • livebsd 8y ago
      Google Groups is horrendous. The mailing list interface works, which is fine. However the web interface and search results are a true PITA. Waiting for the page to load just to jump to a random point in the page takes in the order of 5+ seconds on my system. I remember the first iteration of groups was almost pure html and insanely fast. Like with most google products, it has been bloated to death.
    • IvyMike 8y ago
      Prior to usenet morphing into a primarily binary distribution channel, it was the primary internet discussion forum. There used to be a usenet search company called "DejaNews". It was awesome. Google bought them and repackaged it as Google Groups. They later added their own group stuff to it, and google group search became this weird mismash between the two. Searching usenet was easier and faster 10 years ago.
• bambax 8y ago
  GSA is missing: Google Search Appliance. It was a server you could host on the company's premises that would index content on your network. It got discontinued, not sure why. Maybe the list only includes B2C products.
  • dehrmann 8y ago
    I have zero knowledge of GSA specifically, but corporate intranet search is generally hard, other vendors were already in the space, and the heuristics and ML that make Google search work as well as it does don't work as well with less training data and pages without links and anchor text.
• chrissnell 8y ago
  Let's not forget http://google.com/bsd http://google.com/bsd and http://google.com/linux http://google.com/linux Search engines for BSD and Linux topics in the earliest days of Google. These were very popular with the Slashdot crowd, which was probably responsible for the initial succsss of Google.
  • elkos 8y ago
    That brings back some memories
• OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
  at one point you could search the web for what you were looking for.
• fargo 8y ago
  How can we suggest new items?
• joering2 8y ago
  You should not be worry registering googlecementery.com. You not defaming company you merely stating facts. You would be protected under 1A. and you most likely be indexed by google and bing. So if someone is searching for “google dead projects” it would be easier to find. Just my 2c.
  • techsin101 8y ago
    Can you elaborate
• ASipos 8y ago
  Don't forget Google X (the original one)!
• allard 8y ago
  Don't know if it's dead now. It wasn't when Google sold it nine years ago — Radio Automation.
• thrifter 8y ago
  I don't see Songza on the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza I miss that service.
  • codyogden 8y ago
    Nice! Thank you for sharing. I'm going to add that to https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
• thearn4 8y ago
  I'm worried that Google Voice will join this list sometime soon
  • creeble 8y ago
    Noooooo! I hope not anyway. They injected some time into in the last year or so. I'd be curious to know the number of users; it's still free to get a number afaict. It's probably their least profitable service, I suppose. Maybe they'll start (!) listening in on conversations and figure out a way to make money there.
• SergeyDruid 8y ago
  The list is missing Froogle
• starpilot 8y ago
  I don't miss any of these.
• myfonj 8y ago
  What about leaving flowers, like the one on the slate.com from 2013 [0][1] used to facilitate? [0] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/03/google-graveyard-does-exist-you-can-even-place-flowers-on-your-deceased-favourites/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/03/google-graveyard-does-exi... [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...
• flatline 8y ago
  I still miss google desktop. The Windows search indexer has never been particularly good.
  • Multicomp 8y ago
    FWIW I ended up reading a HN recommendation for the void tools search called "Search Everything" and on an NTFS-formatted drive it is blink-of-an-eye fast. It goes on every computer along with 7z and Zhorn Caffeine
• becga 8y ago
  Cause of death would be nice instead of 'why dead?'
• TheRealPomax 8y ago
  It would be nice if this were orderable by "what year it was released"/"what year it was shuttered", naeemnur. Would also be good to link to the official "shut down" notice, which presumably you had to consult to get the date right, so having a link that people can follow to start their own web trawl would be quite useful.
• rustcharm 8y ago
  Orkut’s story had a strange footnote. It was dominated by Brazilian Portuguese speakers, making other users feel less welcome. That was a tough problem.
• austincheney 8y ago
  Google Wave died because it was a nice hipster idea that never came close to meeting the basic requirements for a corporate office, which was its primary audience. While Google completely failed to realize why this was an obvious and immediate failure Atlassian didn't miss a beat and took all of that marketshare.
• JamesCoyne 8y ago
  The site is not reachable for me. Here is a mirror. https://web.archive.org/web/20181122170006/https://gcemetery.co https://web.archive.org/web/20181122170006/https://gcemetery...
• lisper 8y ago
  Would be nice to have a brief description of what each of these dead projects actually was. I only vaguely remember Aardvark. I've never heard of Dodgeball.
• posi 8y ago
  The upcoming destruction of inbox will be enough to get me off of gmail. I keep on having google PR people tell me that GMail has all those features. I try gmail everymonth and everymonth I'm back on inbox in less than a day. I created https://t.co/gyeQCX7lnU https://t.co/gyeQCX7lnU but it seems no one else really cares about the stuff Id o.
  • eganist 8y ago
    I'd be more likely to sign the petition on change.org, for what it's worth.
• NelsonMinar 8y ago
  Aw I'm sad to not see my first Google product on the list: the old SOAP search API. 2002-2006 RIP. I wrote a bit about it when they shut it down: http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/googleSearchAPI.html http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/googleSearchAPI.html
• steveharman 8y ago
  And now in act of insanity they plan to shutter Inbox . :-( Please sign this guy's petition if you don't want it to happen. https://www.change.org/p/google-google-don-t-kill-inbox https://www.change.org/p/google-google-don-t-kill-inbox
• mxschumacher 8y ago
  an archive of all the dead code of failed commercial products would be interesting. Both to study the implementation itself, but also to see the version history. Lots to learn / reuse I suppose!
• squarefoot 8y ago
  To me embracing and extinguishing the wonderful Dejanews, then when everyone is accustomed to use Google to search for Usenet posts, removing the discussion search filter from Google search engine counts just like a milestone in the planned destruction of Usenet. That move to me looks a lot worse than axing G+ and other services I don't miss at all, because Usenet has been here long before Google and is not one of their products.
• codyogden 8y ago
  Oo..cool! I crowdsourced a lot of lesser known products over at https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com. I'll be pruning the list this weekend to combine/remove some of the phone/device additions that were added by others during Hacktoberfest.
• felipelemos 8y ago
  About Google Reader:. "Google announced they were discontinuing Google Reader, stating the product had a loyal but declining following, and they wanted to focus on fewer products". I cannot believe it's true. My understanding is with a news aggregator like it Google cannot control the news feed like it does with Google news.
  • romed 8y ago
    That’s not the reason. Vic Gundotra, the mastermind/moron behind Google+ would not tolerate any other Google properties with social features. Since you could share feeds and articles on Reader, and because it had followers and comments and whatnot, it had to be sacrificed on the altar of Google+.
• Animats 8y ago
  Looking at this list, it makes you realize that basing your business on a lesser Google product is a major business risk. Consider Spatial OS.[1] This is a new back end for persistent massively multiplayer games. It's a product from a Google "partner", funded by $500M of VC money. It's only available if you use Google's "cloud". Technically, it's impressive. It's being used for a few minor game titles right now. So if you're a major game developer, should you use this for a long-running game? The Google connection adds business risk. It probably won't be a major moneymaker for Google, and there's a good chance they'll drop the offering in two or three years. Then what? It comes with Google-type terms and conditions, the usual "Google can do anything they want". Drop the product, raise the price, cut off your service because you're doing something that competes with some Google interest, that kind of thing. [1] https://improbable.io/games https://improbable.io/games
  • telltruth 8y ago
    Spatial OS is not Google offering by any means. Google is simply huge investor in that company and those folks are using GCP as part of investment aggrement. It’s a dumb move by them but it pays their bills for now. But you are correct. Taking dependency on Google services like maps, offers, product search and other APIs have previously bankrupted few folks. Also, as a user I avoid buying stuff like movies, music, storage space, photo storage etc because it could just disappear tomorrow.
• creeble 8y ago
  Goo.gl was deprecated in March. Not that the world was wanting for yet another url-shortener.
• vram22 8y ago
  Crazy idea: instead of shutting them down, they should have sold them off to companies who could run and grow them. Maybe not for $Bs but for $Ms.
  • ericabiz 8y ago
    The problem, as I understand it from talking to Google employees, is twofold: 1) Many of these products rely on internal infrastructure and/or hosting that isn't readily available outside of Google. (They're basically built on a sort of internal Google "cloud" that has access to code not available outside Google.) 2) It would cost more money than the product reasonably makes to both move the product off the Google infrastructure/codebase AND find a team willing to continue to develop it. Remember, most of these products didn't really make any money; they were internal projects that released externally and had fan clubs.
    • vram22 8y ago
      Interesting, thanks for explaining. Not sure, but there seems to be a bit of a contradiction between your point 2) and the last sentence of your comment.
  • qbaqbaqba 8y ago
    Why, to grow a competition? Also imagine how a manager calling for sale of a unprofitable product would like if someone else made that project profitable.
    • vram22 8y ago
      Well, if they're not making enough profits off it (for Google scale), they could sell it off to some much smaller company. (They could avoid selling it to a rival of their size, like FB etc.). A much smaller company like that would hardly be likely to become a significant competitor to Google, except it they did many such acquisitions. Your point about manager not liking it is somewhat valid though, but even there, the manager who organized the sale could get the credit for bringing in some $Ms to the company :) But as I said, just a crazy idea ...
• corv 8y ago
  Still waiting on the day Google is going to discontinue Google. Used to love the company and what the people there stood for. Crazy how things have changed.
• amachefe 8y ago
  I am still flamoxed by the decision to discontinue GTalk... The build Hangout and later Allo/Duo Talk was lightweight, history backups and usable in every platform. Any startups would love to have Talk
  • pasbesoin 8y ago
    Yeah, talk was kind of on its way to being the next AIM. Then, BLAM, metaphorical bullet between the eyes...
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  Aardvark was the coolest Q&A system ever, it's loss is a real tragedy, it's infuriating how Google bought it just to close it. Also Google+ was the best social network ever.
• catchmeifyoucan 8y ago
  I liked iGoogle. I thought it was kind of cool. It would've been a great "new tab" page in Chrome tbh
• mir3la 8y ago
  It’s missing Google Inbox which I’m going to miss just as much as Reader
• Foobar8568 8y ago
  Didn't Google at one point published or planned to create a CRM solution?
• pasbesoin 8y ago
  Wave solved problems I encountered in commercial (large scale corporations) work. It could prevent "submarining" of communication into email chains and instant messaging conversations inaccessible to those not addressed or cc-ed, also preventing the time-burning, frustrating, and often incomplete "email dive" someone would have to perform to find and forward all these emails to e.g. a new team member or another interested party (new manager, legal, possibly even a third party). Add people to the project/communications' access list(s), and they not only gained participation (without eveyone having to remember to add them to the list of addressees on new emails) but also access to the historical record. It enabled team-level permissions for both on-boarding and off-boarding of new parties: New team members, etc -- like above. Note the off-boarding facility, in that; short of termination, if someone left a project, you (normal PM or dev lead or whatever roll) could take them off the access lists for the shared communications and you could all go your separate ways with a clean, definable and documented break. And a bunch of stuff that's long since left my immediately accessible, conscious memory. (Alternatives I saw did not compare. E.g. "project documentation skeletons" expanded from Lotus Notes templates, that left ginormous subtrees of "forms" that were often very sparsely, if at all, completed -- said completion being entirely, manually dependent upon the individual doing the work. Finding any bit of information in those was a giant PIA; who knows into which form they entered it, if at all, and even when they did, it was surrounded by tons of boilerplate that made it disappear into that "haystack".) BUT... They let front end development hang this very Javascript-heavy UI on it that bogged down "normal" machines, making the end-user experience rather miserable. That "lag" (to be generous in description), combined with a healthy dose of "mystery meat" UI. People hated that. And they stayed away. (If you could even talk them into giving the beta a try... once they had access to the beta...) Maybe it ran fine on internal "Core++" or whatever, ueber-motherboard and maxed RAM Google machines with local hops to the server. But no-one inside seemed to give it a good hard run in the "real world". Or to worry about said performance problems, if they did. Well, I never got invested in it, other than hope and poking at it a bit once someone gave me access. But I continued to think, for a good long while, that the end result was a shame. P.S. This is just my personal, outsider perspective. Maybe I have some things wrong. But it's the impression I ended up with.
• beefman 8y ago
  Now we need one showing all the products killed as soon as the startups that made them were acquired.
• croisillon 8y ago
  There are still links named "Picasa" on Google Maps...
• moreira 8y ago
  Has it seriously been half a decade since Google Reader died? That’s one of those “wow time flies” moments for me.
• capkutay 8y ago
  I really loved Google Wave back in 2009/10. Used it to collab on a college project and we thought it was buggy but pretty useful.
• ledriveby 8y ago
  The cement tiles around Building 17 at Microsoft are actually like a physical graveyard. So many dead products! The 90's CD-ROM multimedia era generated a lot of dead-end franchises.
• Nightshaxx 8y ago
  I love how many products got shutdown and moved into Google+, then google+ got shut down....
• danielovichdk 8y ago
  Google is a search engine. That's it.
• russfink 8y ago
  What about Google Sets? It was on their Labs page until about 2010. Sets let you type in some words, and then it would return additional words that fit with the previous words. Now there is a Google Sheets feature that does it, but I liked the idea of a stand alone page.
  • aleem 8y ago
    It no longer exists in sheets either. Definitely miss this.
• howard941 8y ago
  If the Cemetery contained zombies it might have housed the old Google News [*] https://theoldgnews.com/news/headlines?ned=us&hl=en https://theoldgnews.com/news/headlines?ned=us&hl=en
• miguelmota 8y ago
  Would also like to see a list of Google services currently on life support; not yet dead, but struggling to survive
• mito88 8y ago
  google+ still breathing.
• gowthamgts12 8y ago
  Google Talk is my all time favourite. The UI is cleaner and it just worked everytime. Picasso is also a good photo viewer when I was using Windows. It's a shame really.
• sytelus 8y ago
  Is url shortner dead for real? That would be disaster! So many links on web will turn dead. When I use URL shortner, there is an implicit trust that thing will exist for very very long time. It’s cheap to run, it’s useful for analytics. Why this should ever be killed?
  • archon810 8y ago
    Yeah, he's totally wrong on that one. >After March 30, 2019, all links will continue to redirect to the intended destination. Source: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-shortener.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-goog....
• philonoist 8y ago
  Does DuckDuckGo have the scope to revive some of these and get an edge?
• sytelus 8y ago
  I wonder why sustainance engineering is so hard. We have managed to bring down devops almost exponentially in terms of headcount per server. We have also managed to bring down the cost of storage, hosting etc. The only thing I would have to worry about is patching code for constant stream of security vulnerabilities and upgrading to new framework/platforms after LTS expires. Is this the only driving factor for these shutdowns (generally speaking for all companies)? This could be a good business opportunity for a startup that comes around and can say “ok, we will take care of your app, keep upgrading and patching as needed for a small fee.”. More importantly we need better development methodology that has infinite sustainance as native as everything test cases.
• gsich 8y ago
  I still use Picasa to tag photos with face recognition. Haven't found anything even remotely better. I hoped for some advancements with the current ML hype. For hints I would be thankful. Requirements: Must work offline, must store face information in the picture (XMP). Must work with ~1 TB of pictures. Digikam unfortunately sucks. Bad face recognotion and bad UI.
• majani 8y ago
  I don't think it's fair to include products that were rebranded and had their data moved over to the new service e.g Picasa and Urchin