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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
by 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 agoAt 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 agoProbably, 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 agoI 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 agoIf 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 agoI 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 agoAllo 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 agoAlso, consider that several of these services still exist in one form or another.
- cribbles 8y agoI 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 agoGoogle 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 agoYouTube 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 agoGoogle 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 agoGoogle died? A strange thing to say about a company with a market capitalisation of 722 billion USD.
- FeralAlien 8y agoEh 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 agoFacebook is dead too? Outside of top 3 by market value = "dead"?
- HugoDaniel 8y agohttps://ycharts.com/companies/IBM/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/IBM/market_cap
- praneshp 8y agoIs there a reason you linked ibm here? Please elaborate for the not so smart.
- throwaway2048 8y agoa "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 agoI 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 agoBut Inbox got integrated into Gmail.
- vkazanov 8y agoSo who cares? Inbox was good because it was not Gmail, not because Gmail lacked features from it.
- izacus 8y agoIn what way?
- fingerlocks 8y agoI 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 agoThe 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 agoIndeed. 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 agoBut you know Google is not a startup.
- apetrovic 8y agoGoogle 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 agoNow killing G+, they can resurrect GReader :D
- jddj 8y agoThe 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 agoIt is missing the disappearance of "don't be evil."
- neuronexmachina 8y agoIMHO, 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 agoGoogle 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 agoUnfortunately, the list is not complete. But it's useful to demonstrate to the boss that Google isn't ready for enterprise yet.
- ehsankia 8y agoNot 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 agoNormally 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 agoThe 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 agoMicrosoft 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.