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Killed by Google
- vlindos 8y agoWill be interesting to see how many businesses are killed by each of these products.
- IBM 8y agoSomeone on Something Awful made one too but this one looks a lot better (and is up-to-date). https://didgoogleshutdown.com/ https://didgoogleshutdown.com/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ColinWright 8y agoIs this related to "The Google Cemetery" ?? Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509735 HUGE discussion there ...
- jaytaylor 8y agoYes, I found this link there. Killed by Google is more comprehensive and detailed compared to the cemetery site.
- yellow_lead 8y agoI could see someone creating a service like this for looking up discontinued products of many companies. Could be great for market research.
- ronilan 8y agoExcellent typography. Wish all sites were as readable.
- gkoberger 8y agoIt sucks when Google kills a product I love (okay, pretty much just Google Reader), but I also like that it means Google can take risks on new products. If they didn't have a mentality of trying lots of new things, we likely wouldn't have GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs, Android, etc... not to mention new things like WayMo or Calico. On top of that, most "dead" products aren't gone completely... there's a strong Google alternative that they're investing in.
- timClicks 8y agoThe most obvious case of this is Writely, listed right down the bottom. Yes, the brand is well dead, but Google Docs is still very strong.
- on_and_off 8y agoAlso Fabric. Sure they are killing the brand but they have been busy merging Crashlytics and Firebase crashes into one product for a very long time. Fabric even has a nice roadmap page where they explain where this is going. Also both products have different advantages : - Fabric is way more mature - The base approach of Firebase is 100% better than what Fabric does : it runs on a separate process so it can catch crashes that are totally silent for Fabric, like crash at startup or native layer crash. So while I would not have liked to still have 2 competitors, it is good to see these merged.
- emmelaich 8y agoMost are replaced or included in some other G product. So they do live on.
- cafebabbe 8y agoGoogle reader. never forget.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoI never used it, what were killer the features that makes it so dearly missed? I would guess solid parsing, being fast and accessible from anywhere, but surely there's more?
- gulperxcx 8y agoI've never used it myself but from the looks of the UI, it seems to be heavily influenced by gmail in design. here's the google reader blog for historical reference: http://googlereader.blogspot.com http://googlereader.blogspot.com
- teh_klev 8y agoIt was a fantastic RSS aggregator. Had a superb compact UI you could read on a tiny phone screen in bed. It was fast and (yeah ok, free). It had everything you needed to keep on top of all your feeds. Everything else pales in comparison (sure I know there's https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ and the like, but Google Reader just worked).
- teh_klev 8y agoApropos my previous comment. I'm 51 and lived through the inception of RSS (Dave Winer, RSS, Atom etc). It was a normal thing before Facebook and Google+ came along and shat on the parade.
- SmirkingRevenge 8y agoI forgot. Feedly works just fine and so do several other alternatives.
- stefantalpalaru 8y agoTiny Tiny RSS is a decent replacement: https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/
- tannhaeuser 8y agoGoogle hasn't just killed products, they destroyed whole community channels with their actions, eg. RSS and nntp archives.
- trevyn 8y agoUsenet archives are still there, if you search from https://groups.google.com/forum https://groups.google.com/forum
- teh_klev 8y agoI've searched for some of my old posts from the early 90's onwards (mostly in non-controversial political discussions and comp.*), they're not there. It seems to be a selective archive. It's verging on impossible to find anything meaningful.
- xtracto 8y agoOne thought that I have had is, would NNTP nowadays be a good place for discussion? There are still news servers (mainly used for piracy last I remember), but maybe September has actually ended in Usenet given that all the 12 year olds have moved on to facebook.
- romed 8y agoThis is backwards. Google rescued Deja’s archives which were going to be deleted and then expanded the archives back to 1981. Without Google’s interventions you’d all be left wondering what was in Usenet.
- sbilstein 8y agoI’m at least glad that there aren’t teams full of disgruntled Googlers maintaining zombie products. That is the worst for job satisfaction.
- SmirkingRevenge 8y agoI'm really tired of this topic, and no one has said anything remotely new or insightful on it for quite some time. Can we.. Maybe move on? Google discontinues products if they don't meet whatever their internal criteria is for success. Some people don't like it. Some people don't care. That's about all there is to say.
- zwily 8y agoI suspect we’ll move on from this topic about the same time we move on from believing every new iPhone release is the beginning of the end for Apple.
- romed 8y agoA lot of these are pretty silly. 100% of Songza features were rolled into Google Music. Listing every phone they no longer market doesn’t make a lot of sense either. You might as well list Maps for Series 60 phones if you wanted to get down to that level.
- codyogden 8y agoCreator here. And I agree. Listing every phone is silly. A lot of these were added during Hacktoberfest. Going to go through and prune/combine/edit this weekend sometime.
- zifnab06 8y agoHaving all the Android devices they no longer sell is also pretty silly. I doubt anyone wants to buy a Nexus One today. Also Nexus Q never made it past user testing (they never sold them, they were a free gift for IO, it was a horrible Chromecast/Nexus player precursor)
- murderfs 8y agoWell, it was sold, and then unsold. They took money for preorders, and then changed their minds and gave everyone who preordered their money back along with a free Nexus Q.
- darren_ 8y ago(googler on maps here) the maps backend team makes an explicit effort to keep old things going, I wouldn't be surprised if old gmaps on some really ancient phones still worked. Last I checked the pre-2012 Apple Maps (the one that used google tiles, iOS5 and below) still works.
- romed 8y agoYeah, it is amazing. Maps only recently stopped working on my ancient BlackBerry.
- murderfs 8y agoListing every single hardware product seems a bit dubious...
- darren_ 8y agoDefinitely the best looking and most comprehensive of the three sites on this theme I've seen. Using the term 'kill' is unnecessarily negative, IMO, especially when the site author seems to consider 'rebranding' something as 'killing' it.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoSome remarks required, eg. Pixel and Pixel XL, the products were 2 years old. There is a Google Pixel 3 XL launched in October 2018. The Pixel line isn't dead. It's logical that harware gets updated and/or name changed. They changed the Nexus line as budget model to Pixel flagship model to less hurt their partners (didn't like it also though). Google Nexus 4 / Samsung Nexus, migrated to Pixel. Google Inbox, the product is killed, but the features are said to be partially migrated to Gmail. Google Video Player, migrated to webm. Project Tango to ArCode ( is mentioned there) Google Goggles, migrated to Google Lens app. None the less, a lot are dead and buried though. I used goo.gl a lot, but there are other services. For RSS, i use my own RSS application: http://handlr.sapico.me/ http://handlr.sapico.me/
- O1111OOO 8y ago> The Pixel line isn't dead. It's logical that harware gets updated Agree and was similarly put off by a few entries: some of the items listed are evolutions of a product line. Reader was the biggest deal for me but... interestingly, it helped me deGoogle-fy. I'd be curious to see a similar set for Microsoft products. Off the top of my head, they had Zune, MSN network, Mobile (pocket pc) and the recent attempt, Microsoft Money, Windows RT, some Office Products for Apple (which, if I recall, really hurt the OS at the time)... They also had a number of products, that on the surface, appeared to be a continuation of a line but seemed (to me) a way to force users into new data formats (and reinvigorate sales).
- dymk 8y agoHalf of these are either hardware products which reached EOL (just like every other manufacture, maybe besides Apple), or rebranding/merging of one product into another, or just being split out into a separate Alphabet company. Not particularly compelling.
- mehrdadn 8y agoThis seems pretty misleading... I wouldn't classify Google X as "killed" when it was transformed into an Alphabet company.
- pscsbs 8y agoThis is why Google struggles to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in the enterprise cloud space - the trust that these services will be maintained and legacy support provided just isn't there for large enterprise clients.
- xtracto 8y agoYes! that is why I would never trust my cloud infrastructure to GCS... who knows if they will discontinue their S3 copy in two years.
- SiVal 8y agoEven when they don't kill the service, they can increase its price so dramatically overnight that it may as well have been killed, as many who built a business on Google Maps discovered. When Google makes almost all of its money on advertising, everything else is of so little concern to them that they can kill a service or arbitrarily make a change that they expect will literally drive away 90% of its customers, and it won't matter. Apple is that way about 3rd-party developers, too. When they make almost all of the software in-house that they hope you will use, they can make platform changes that will break others' apps and shrug it off. Their software will be prepared for the changes, and if you can't afford to keep rebuilding your product given the tiny price you have to sell it for, Apple won't notice that you're gone. Apple could probably set up a special program for about a dozen major software providers (Adobe, Google, Facebook,...), tell the rest to build web apps (as Jobs originally planned), and Apple would "bravely" get past the howls of complaint and move on mostly unscathed. The majority of us really need to be as biased as we reasonably can be toward open systems, standards, and platforms that can't be shut down by a single, large player that has no need for our business.
- gonyea 8y agoSome items on this list are rather silly. Does anybody consider the iPhone 7 as being “Killed by Apple” or was it just superseded by newer hardware?
- codyogden 8y agoThanks for sharing Killed by Google. I started it after the Inbox by Google announcement. My goal was to create a statement of criticism against churn of consumer products by Google. I think there is also a statement about closed systems that are controlled by a single player/entity, and I wanted to do it in a tongue-in-cheek form. I’m also a developer, and I understand the product lifecycle. There are still some things wrong with the list that have been pointed out, but this is an open source project. I’m going to be editing and pruning over this weekend. I hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving, and everyone outside the US is heading into a restful weekend. Edit: Looks like we got removed from the top listings. If you'd like to contribute or make a suggestion, feel free to create an issue in the Github repo. Thank you all!
- hawski 8y agoI don't understand what they mean by killed. For example Chromebook Pixel 2 (2015) will receive updates till mid-2020.