10 ms·

Google Labs Winding Down

283 points by snikolic 15y ago

forgotusername 15y ago
We're deprecating our platform for releasing technically interesting experiments that don't make us money
scottyallen 15y ago
This doesn't come at all as a surprise to me. Google Labs was well known internally for being a graveyard for projects that, ironically, was really hard to launch stuff in. Anything that Google launches anywhere automatically gets a huge amount of traffic, and, because it has the Google brand on it, it's expected to meet a fairly high quality, stability, and scalability bar. In practice, this meant was never really possible to use Labs for throwing something up quickly to see if it stuck. This, combined with the maintenance overhead of keeping the various projects running (which were often grafted onto other larger codebases), makes shutting it down a pretty obvious decision.
- codingthebeach 15y ago
  Obvious decision or not, Google Labs has been one of my favorite parts of Google for years. For me at least, this deprecation pushes Google one notch closer to "boring megacorp" and one notch further away from the sort of cool "research garden" that Google is famous for being. I'm not saying Labs was the forefront of Google research, just that it was a fun, lighthearted place where nifty (and often quite strange) ideas could be trotted out.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    For me it's not even so much the research angle, as the power-user-features angle. Via Google Labs you could enable features and interface customizations that for various reasons didn't make sense to put into the default product, especially in Gmail and Google Maps. Some were not at all researchy, just simple interface enhancements, like the "drop lat/lon marker" feature in Google Maps. I'll miss that flexibility if they don't replace it with some kind of advanced-options config.
    - kissickas 15y ago
      Product-specific labs, like Google Maps Labs or Gmail Labs, are still staying. This announcement is only about Google Labs.
    - tonfa 15y ago
      Google Labs is different from the gmail/maps labs. See the linked blog post and http://www.googlelabs.com/ http://www.googlelabs.com/.
      - _delirium 15y ago
        Ah cool; it looks like that clarification was added in an update. I had assumed that those were part of the overall "Google Labs" project, but maybe that was just a (now-obsolete) branding strategy to tie together all the "labs" stuff.
  - patrickaljord 15y ago
    > Google Labs has been one of my favorite parts of Google for years I prefer their open source page: http://code.google.com/more/#google-resources http://code.google.com/more/#google-resources With projects such as closure, gwt, chromium, android,golang etc
- derefr 15y ago
  > Anything that Google launches anywhere automatically gets a huge amount of traffic ...if it's actually Google-branded. Perhaps Google means to do its future experiments more like Searchmash, where the project just happened to be run by Google, but had no mention of Google anywhere on it.
- sytelus 15y ago
  Wrong on so many counts. Look at the Google Labs pages. There are 7 of them out with at least 1.5 are "graduated" to read products. Labs is very good playground when you don't know how things will shape and you don't want to be confined by corp mandates of tools, processes etc. If things takes off then it gets graduated to real product by having more people work on it. If you look at Labs projects, many are pretty cool. Things like Google Groups came out of Labs. Labs decision might be the stupidest decision yet execs have made there. They are investing huge in buying small start ups and they have even thing like Google ventures. It doesn't make any sense to kill of Labs.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
The scary thing about that announcement are it uses the exact same terminology Sun Microsystems used. 'All the wood behind one arrow' being the most relevant. Since I know some of the ex-Sun, current-Google folks I"m guessing at least a few of them flinched reflexively at that. That being said, I hope this does not mean they are killing off their research group. If they did I think it would be a colossally poor move on Google's part. While Google is famous for it's 20% time initiative its also infamous for having folks deny it or 'target' it (which is to say you can spend 20% of your time working on anything you want as long as it helps this department's goals) which made it difficult to be a source of innovation.
- gsharma 15y ago
  I believe it is not about killing the research, but more of killing the public aspect of it. They want to be less open about future products/innovations and be more like Apple. Edit: To make it clear - Not that anything is wrong with it. It's probably better for the company.
  - coderdude 15y ago
    Looks like some HN users have caught the butt-rage since nothing you said was false except maybe that Google would want to be like Apple. Edit: Uh oh, looks like it's spreading to me now. Here's something shiny to distract you: OS X Lion, iOS5, MacBook Air, App Store is better than Android.
    - FrojoS 15y ago
      That might be. Apple now has much more revenue than Google. Though, just today I was thinking: 'Well, Google with their young nerdy founders might just not care as much about profit.' I hope Google won't sacrifice geeky projects like autonomous cars for better quarterly numbers.
      - coderdude 15y ago
        Good thing their autonomous cars project isn't part of Labs and could make them an obscene amount of money if it works out.
contextfree 15y ago
I don't know anything about archery, but this strikes me as a weird metaphor - is the amount of wood that goes into an arrow really what makes it hit the target?
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I'd guess it's a mass thing. The more mass you have in the shaft of your arrow, the more momentum it has- ergo, the further it flies and the harder it strikes the target.
- snikolic 15y ago
  A bigger arrow to hit a bigger target, perhaps? I don't know. I obviously intuit the metaphor, but it's sort of lost on me too. Off to wikipedia... Edit: Also, I should note that this tangential thread is why I love HN.
- niels_olson 15y ago
  more mass = more efficienty energy transfer from bow to arrow, better energy conservation in flight, and deeper target penetration.
  - mdda 15y ago
    And you lose everything if it was aimed in the wrong direction.
- Kapelson 15y ago
  Maybe it's a momentum thing: an arrow with more wood would be heavier, and as a result it would create a greater impact. Weird metaphor indeed.
  - gaius 15y ago
    ... But have a shorter range. Perhaps it is a good metaphor for killing off a blue-sky lab after all.
- RickHull 15y ago
tomkarlo 15y ago
Given the first-day issues with launching experiments under the Google brand, would it make sense for them to sometimes 'stealth launch' projects without an explicit Google branding? Experimentation is important for innovation.
- watmough 15y ago
  Yes, and maybe with the side-effect of getting a truer read on reaction versus the reaction to experiments under a google banner. Nonetheless it may make google a less fun place to be if they do drop a bunch of people, and they surely will lose some of their tech buzz cred.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    I don't think there's been any implication that they're cutting people related to this change... I read it as the reverse - they're trying to focus the headcount they have on projects they consider more core to their business, which is probably more effective than adding headcount and keeping labs.
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  They've been doing this with Slide. Google bought them out a while back, but they're still operating under the Slide banner and operating more or less independent of Google.
bauchidgw 15y ago
goodbye pagespeed / pagespeedonline / mod_pagespeed ...
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  Uh, no. It's open source, so even if Google took it down you could put it on Github and keep maintaining it. It'll likely just move to Google Code.
invisiblefunnel 15y ago
Google labs lab winding down
Shenglong 15y ago
Does this mean I might lose my Multiple Inbox on GMail? ... I hope at least that one sticks.
redthrowaway 15y ago
I liked the customization that Labs offers (undo send in gmail being a brilliant example), but I can see where they're coming from on the focus front. So long as I get to keep the features I currently have enabled, I'm happy.
- FaceKicker 15y ago
  I believe this only applies to the "main" Google Labs (http://www.googlelabs.com/ http://www.googlelabs.com/), not to things called "Labs" that are integrated in products like Gmail.
traldan 15y ago
Does this include Gmail labs? If so, fuck.
- andybak 15y ago
  Apparently not.
brandonb 15y ago
Sometimes you hear people say "we're like a startup inside of a big company." This is a great example of why it's hard to make that work. In a big company, you have one source of funding, and they can pull the plug at any moment--sometimes because your project is doing badly, and sometimes just because you don't fit into the overall corporate strategy this year. At a startup, you only die if you run out of money (which doesn't happen overnight), and if an existing investor says no, you can still raise capital on the open market.
macrael 15y ago
Relatedly, Steve Ballmer a few weeks ago at Microsoft's earnings: "We increasingly are only working on things that are actually very important. The day and age of idle, smaller things [at Microsoft] is a little bit behind us. We're putting more energy behind fewer things than we have historically."[1] [1]:http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/ballmer-discusses-future-microsofts-future-139678 http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/b...
- yalogin 15y ago
  This is probably a bigger news and also sadder as Microsoft labs does great research and really hardcore stuff that never sees daylight. Google labs on the other hand though is more consumer oriented.
shapeshed 15y ago
so the strategy is we'll just buy innovation or we don't care about innovation?
jambo 15y ago
I hope this isn't bad news for Swiffy, the very cool Flash->HTML5 converter they launched not long ago. Hopefully they'll commit to licensing the runtime so that people can continue to use their converted files. If they take it down, existing Swiffy conversions will stop working, and right now it says "All Rights Reserved" at the top of the runtime they host. Anyone know if there are any plans to open source projects like this, or if there's a way to get in touch with someone who could do so? I've submitted feedback to their feedback form, but I'm not sure if it will be seen. http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/ http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/
jameswilsterman 15y ago
This had to happen: http://morewoodbehindfewerarrows.tumblr.com/ http://morewoodbehindfewerarrows.tumblr.com/
shacker 15y ago
it really was just a matter of time.
russell 15y ago
Corporate labs are funny things. Where would the valley be without Xerox PARC or America without Bell Labs? But from the corporate view they are fairly inefficient. They are a very academic environment, working at a leisurely pace, not at all like startups or even the lean-and-mean among established companies. Self-education and publication is as much a goal as improving the bottom line. Eventually the suits take notice and start reorganizing things to bring the fruits of their labor immediately to market. It happened at Bell, at PARC and at a lab where I was resident. Unfortunately, the shift in focus doesnt really work. The researchers cant shift their timelines. Partially baked ideas dont easily become marketable products and the future becomes sacrificed to the immediate. If you want short term results, the policy of engineers working on their own pet projects 20% time is really fruitful, but the promising ones then need time and resources to become fully realized. I think thats where Google failed. Maybe Google is inventing something better than Google Labs. I can see a successful approach being to sprout mini-labs around promising projects where the developer(s) get resources like additional developers, designers, market researchers, QA and the like. This of course sounds a lot like internal entrepreneurial startups, which havent been notably successful. I can hope that Google has something more innovative up its sleeve than the bottom line.
- rxin 15y ago
  Google Labs itself is just a repository of experimental projects, not a research organization. It is not the same idea as PARC, which is a research organization.
usaar333 15y ago
How does this affect existing labs products? For instance I use apps like Google goggles, Google listen, My Tracks, and Shopper
rachelbythebay 15y ago
Fewer arrows? Is that how you say "fewer sharp people"?
zipdog 15y ago
Given the issue of launching projects under the weight of the Google brand, I don't see why Google doesn't borrow the idea of Hollywood studios to just have a 'separate studio' brand for things that aren't ready for the big time, while still letting them go live to users (I realize this is about focusing energy on Google Plus, I'm just concerned they won't bring Labs back)
flocial 15y ago
I remember a quote from the person who worked on Google+ before heading for Facebook saying "things got to bureaucratic and political" or something to that effect. It feels like a downward spiral or at least seems like a common pattern where an organization loses its agility (not to be confused with "agile") and starts compensating with cutting down. Labs had an amazing run but Google surely needs to re-invent itself to handle the challenges ahead. Honestly, their setup is not that different from Microsoft where they have cash cows concentrated in several areas whereas Apple has more flexibility with a wider range of services without being spread out too much.
natasham25 15y ago
This is a big mistake for Google. One of the big allures of working for Google as an engineer is doing something that gets millions of views. Google Labs is one of the most exciting aspects of this idea, since it lets engineers showcase anything they create to millions of consumers. Now only products that are already in line with the Google products will have the same amount of publicity. This is a very sad day for Google engineers. I will not be surprised to see Google loose even more talented geniuses because of this. Goodbye innovation, hello corporation.
acak 15y ago
Google's '20 percent time' will still allow employees to keep experimenting. http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/20/20-percent/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/20/20-percent/
ck2 15y ago
I thought the new google was going to have more engineers in charge. This does not feel like engineers in charge. It feels like public relations people in charge.
sharjeel 15y ago
This isn't April Fool joke, is it?
sytelus 15y ago
More dead wood behind fewer sharp ideas.

283 points by snikolic 15y ago

We're deprecating our platform for releasing technically interesting experiments that don't make us money

This doesn't come at all as a surprise to me. Google Labs was well known internally for being a graveyard for projects that, ironically, was really hard to launch stuff in. Anything that Google launches anywhere automatically gets a huge amount of traffic, and, because it has the Google brand on it, it's expected to meet a fairly high quality, stability, and scalability bar. In practice, this meant was never really possible to use Labs for throwing something up quickly to see if it stuck. This, combined with the maintenance overhead of keeping the various projects running (which were often grafted onto other larger codebases), makes shutting it down a pretty obvious decision.

codingthebeach 15y ago
Obvious decision or not, Google Labs has been one of my favorite parts of Google for years. For me at least, this deprecation pushes Google one notch closer to "boring megacorp" and one notch further away from the sort of cool "research garden" that Google is famous for being. I'm not saying Labs was the forefront of Google research, just that it was a fun, lighthearted place where nifty (and often quite strange) ideas could be trotted out.
- _delirium 15y ago
  For me it's not even so much the research angle, as the power-user-features angle. Via Google Labs you could enable features and interface customizations that for various reasons didn't make sense to put into the default product, especially in Gmail and Google Maps. Some were not at all researchy, just simple interface enhancements, like the "drop lat/lon marker" feature in Google Maps. I'll miss that flexibility if they don't replace it with some kind of advanced-options config.
  - kissickas 15y ago
    Product-specific labs, like Google Maps Labs or Gmail Labs, are still staying. This announcement is only about Google Labs.
  - tonfa 15y ago
    Google Labs is different from the gmail/maps labs. See the linked blog post and http://www.googlelabs.com/ http://www.googlelabs.com/.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      Ah cool; it looks like that clarification was added in an update. I had assumed that those were part of the overall "Google Labs" project, but maybe that was just a (now-obsolete) branding strategy to tie together all the "labs" stuff.
- patrickaljord 15y ago
  > Google Labs has been one of my favorite parts of Google for years I prefer their open source page: http://code.google.com/more/#google-resources http://code.google.com/more/#google-resources With projects such as closure, gwt, chromium, android,golang etc
derefr 15y ago
> Anything that Google launches anywhere automatically gets a huge amount of traffic ...if it's actually Google-branded. Perhaps Google means to do its future experiments more like Searchmash, where the project just happened to be run by Google, but had no mention of Google anywhere on it.
sytelus 15y ago
Wrong on so many counts. Look at the Google Labs pages. There are 7 of them out with at least 1.5 are "graduated" to read products. Labs is very good playground when you don't know how things will shape and you don't want to be confined by corp mandates of tools, processes etc. If things takes off then it gets graduated to real product by having more people work on it. If you look at Labs projects, many are pretty cool. Things like Google Groups came out of Labs. Labs decision might be the stupidest decision yet execs have made there. They are investing huge in buying small start ups and they have even thing like Google ventures. It doesn't make any sense to kill of Labs.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

The scary thing about that announcement are it uses the exact same terminology Sun Microsystems used. 'All the wood behind one arrow' being the most relevant. Since I know some of the ex-Sun, current-Google folks I"m guessing at least a few of them flinched reflexively at that. That being said, I hope this does not mean they are killing off their research group. If they did I think it would be a colossally poor move on Google's part. While Google is famous for it's 20% time initiative its also infamous for having folks deny it or 'target' it (which is to say you can spend 20% of your time working on anything you want as long as it helps this department's goals) which made it difficult to be a source of innovation.

gsharma 15y ago
I believe it is not about killing the research, but more of killing the public aspect of it. They want to be less open about future products/innovations and be more like Apple. Edit: To make it clear - Not that anything is wrong with it. It's probably better for the company.
- coderdude 15y ago
  Looks like some HN users have caught the butt-rage since nothing you said was false except maybe that Google would want to be like Apple. Edit: Uh oh, looks like it's spreading to me now. Here's something shiny to distract you: OS X Lion, iOS5, MacBook Air, App Store is better than Android.
  - FrojoS 15y ago
    That might be. Apple now has much more revenue than Google. Though, just today I was thinking: 'Well, Google with their young nerdy founders might just not care as much about profit.' I hope Google won't sacrifice geeky projects like autonomous cars for better quarterly numbers.
    - coderdude 15y ago
      Good thing their autonomous cars project isn't part of Labs and could make them an obscene amount of money if it works out.

contextfree 15y ago

I don't know anything about archery, but this strikes me as a weird metaphor - is the amount of wood that goes into an arrow really what makes it hit the target?

sliverstorm 15y ago
I'd guess it's a mass thing. The more mass you have in the shaft of your arrow, the more momentum it has- ergo, the further it flies and the harder it strikes the target.
snikolic 15y ago
A bigger arrow to hit a bigger target, perhaps? I don't know. I obviously intuit the metaphor, but it's sort of lost on me too. Off to wikipedia... Edit: Also, I should note that this tangential thread is why I love HN.
niels_olson 15y ago
more mass = more efficienty energy transfer from bow to arrow, better energy conservation in flight, and deeper target penetration.
- mdda 15y ago
  And you lose everything if it was aimed in the wrong direction.
Kapelson 15y ago
Maybe it's a momentum thing: an arrow with more wood would be heavier, and as a result it would create a greater impact. Weird metaphor indeed.
- gaius 15y ago
  ... But have a shorter range. Perhaps it is a good metaphor for killing off a blue-sky lab after all.
RickHull 15y ago

tomkarlo 15y ago

Given the first-day issues with launching experiments under the Google brand, would it make sense for them to sometimes 'stealth launch' projects without an explicit Google branding? Experimentation is important for innovation.

watmough 15y ago
Yes, and maybe with the side-effect of getting a truer read on reaction versus the reaction to experiments under a google banner. Nonetheless it may make google a less fun place to be if they do drop a bunch of people, and they surely will lose some of their tech buzz cred.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  I don't think there's been any implication that they're cutting people related to this change... I read it as the reverse - they're trying to focus the headcount they have on projects they consider more core to their business, which is probably more effective than adding headcount and keeping labs.
ConstantineXVI 15y ago
They've been doing this with Slide. Google bought them out a while back, but they're still operating under the Slide banner and operating more or less independent of Google.

bauchidgw 15y ago

goodbye pagespeed / pagespeedonline / mod_pagespeed ...

ceejayoz 15y ago
Uh, no. It's open source, so even if Google took it down you could put it on Github and keep maintaining it. It'll likely just move to Google Code.

invisiblefunnel 15y ago

Google labs lab winding down

Shenglong 15y ago

Does this mean I might lose my Multiple Inbox on GMail? ... I hope at least that one sticks.

redthrowaway 15y ago

I liked the customization that Labs offers (undo send in gmail being a brilliant example), but I can see where they're coming from on the focus front. So long as I get to keep the features I currently have enabled, I'm happy.

FaceKicker 15y ago
I believe this only applies to the "main" Google Labs (http://www.googlelabs.com/ http://www.googlelabs.com/), not to things called "Labs" that are integrated in products like Gmail.

traldan 15y ago

Does this include Gmail labs? If so, fuck.

andybak 15y ago
Apparently not.

brandonb 15y ago

Sometimes you hear people say "we're like a startup inside of a big company." This is a great example of why it's hard to make that work. In a big company, you have one source of funding, and they can pull the plug at any moment--sometimes because your project is doing badly, and sometimes just because you don't fit into the overall corporate strategy this year. At a startup, you only die if you run out of money (which doesn't happen overnight), and if an existing investor says no, you can still raise capital on the open market.

macrael 15y ago

Relatedly, Steve Ballmer a few weeks ago at Microsoft's earnings: "We increasingly are only working on things that are actually very important. The day and age of idle, smaller things [at Microsoft] is a little bit behind us. We're putting more energy behind fewer things than we have historically."[1] [1]:http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/ballmer-discusses-future-microsofts-future-139678 http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/b...

yalogin 15y ago
This is probably a bigger news and also sadder as Microsoft labs does great research and really hardcore stuff that never sees daylight. Google labs on the other hand though is more consumer oriented.

shapeshed 15y ago

so the strategy is we'll just buy innovation or we don't care about innovation?

jambo 15y ago

I hope this isn't bad news for Swiffy, the very cool Flash->HTML5 converter they launched not long ago. Hopefully they'll commit to licensing the runtime so that people can continue to use their converted files. If they take it down, existing Swiffy conversions will stop working, and right now it says "All Rights Reserved" at the top of the runtime they host. Anyone know if there are any plans to open source projects like this, or if there's a way to get in touch with someone who could do so? I've submitted feedback to their feedback form, but I'm not sure if it will be seen. http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/ http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/

jameswilsterman 15y ago

This had to happen: http://morewoodbehindfewerarrows.tumblr.com/ http://morewoodbehindfewerarrows.tumblr.com/

shacker 15y ago

it really was just a matter of time.

russell 15y ago

Corporate labs are funny things. Where would the valley be without Xerox PARC or America without Bell Labs? But from the corporate view they are fairly inefficient. They are a very academic environment, working at a leisurely pace, not at all like startups or even the lean-and-mean among established companies. Self-education and publication is as much a goal as improving the bottom line. Eventually the suits take notice and start reorganizing things to bring the fruits of their labor immediately to market. It happened at Bell, at PARC and at a lab where I was resident. Unfortunately, the shift in focus doesnt really work. The researchers cant shift their timelines. Partially baked ideas dont easily become marketable products and the future becomes sacrificed to the immediate. If you want short term results, the policy of engineers working on their own pet projects 20% time is really fruitful, but the promising ones then need time and resources to become fully realized. I think thats where Google failed. Maybe Google is inventing something better than Google Labs. I can see a successful approach being to sprout mini-labs around promising projects where the developer(s) get resources like additional developers, designers, market researchers, QA and the like. This of course sounds a lot like internal entrepreneurial startups, which havent been notably successful. I can hope that Google has something more innovative up its sleeve than the bottom line.

rxin 15y ago
Google Labs itself is just a repository of experimental projects, not a research organization. It is not the same idea as PARC, which is a research organization.

usaar333 15y ago

How does this affect existing labs products? For instance I use apps like Google goggles, Google listen, My Tracks, and Shopper

rachelbythebay 15y ago

Fewer arrows? Is that how you say "fewer sharp people"?

zipdog 15y ago

Given the issue of launching projects under the weight of the Google brand, I don't see why Google doesn't borrow the idea of Hollywood studios to just have a 'separate studio' brand for things that aren't ready for the big time, while still letting them go live to users (I realize this is about focusing energy on Google Plus, I'm just concerned they won't bring Labs back)

flocial 15y ago

I remember a quote from the person who worked on Google+ before heading for Facebook saying "things got to bureaucratic and political" or something to that effect. It feels like a downward spiral or at least seems like a common pattern where an organization loses its agility (not to be confused with "agile") and starts compensating with cutting down. Labs had an amazing run but Google surely needs to re-invent itself to handle the challenges ahead. Honestly, their setup is not that different from Microsoft where they have cash cows concentrated in several areas whereas Apple has more flexibility with a wider range of services without being spread out too much.

natasham25 15y ago

This is a big mistake for Google. One of the big allures of working for Google as an engineer is doing something that gets millions of views. Google Labs is one of the most exciting aspects of this idea, since it lets engineers showcase anything they create to millions of consumers. Now only products that are already in line with the Google products will have the same amount of publicity. This is a very sad day for Google engineers. I will not be surprised to see Google loose even more talented geniuses because of this. Goodbye innovation, hello corporation.

acak 15y ago

Google's '20 percent time' will still allow employees to keep experimenting. http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/20/20-percent/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/20/20-percent/

ck2 15y ago

I thought the new google was going to have more engineers in charge. This does not feel like engineers in charge. It feels like public relations people in charge.

sharjeel 15y ago

This isn't April Fool joke, is it?

sytelus 15y ago

More dead wood behind fewer sharp ideas.