7 ms·
A fall spring-cleaning - Google products getting shut down
- pragmatic 15y agoAnyone use any of these products being shut down? Is there an opportunity to replace any of these for a startup?
- gwern 15y agoI used Google Notebook for a while, but I thought they shut it down years ago, not long after I escaped with my notes to Evernote.
- coderdude 15y agoIt wasn't an escape if they kept it around years after you stopped using it.
- revorad 15y agoI love Google notebook. They stopped developing it a while ago, but I've been using it a lot anyway. It's my favourite no-frills note taking app in the cloud. I guess now I will have to move to something else. I would love to use a simple editor which syncs to my Dropbox text files. I've seen some apps which do that but they try too hard to be cool and go overboard with their javascript animations, making them unusably slow. I might write my own.
- abraham 15y agoIt is more of a todo tool but you might like http://todotxt.com/ http://todotxt.com/
- paulirish 15y agoRelatedly, the gmail tasks have a little-known fullscreen UI: https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas?pli=1 https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas?pli=1 Also a mobile webapp.
- sdz 15y agoThere is Simplenote (http://simplenoteapp.com http://simplenoteapp.com), which is a pretty no-frills web app that also integrates with a number of native apps (including Notational Velocity if you're on OS X).
- Wibblesworth 15y agoI wrote Noogle Goatbook (http://www.nooglegoatbook.com/ http://www.nooglegoatbook.com/) 2 years ago when they first announced Google Notebook was being discontinued. It's still a little rough but I might continue working on it and/or stick it on github if people are interested.
- revorad 15y agoThat is the most awesome product name ever. And it looks quite good too. It's a shame it's hosted on Google App Engine though. Given their new pricing changes, you might have to move it. Maybe you should launch Noogle Gap Engine...
- racecar789 15y agoGoogle Docs has a competing product to almost every MS Office component. OneNote is a staple to the MS Office family. I'd really like to know why Google deprecated Notebook. It was a great product.
- thalecress 15y agoI use Google Desktop dozens of times daily. I suspect lots of enterprise users are in the same XP boat without a fast search paddle.
- cooperadymas 15y agoYou might be interested in: http://www.voidtools.com/ http://www.voidtools.com/ http://www.launchy.net/ http://www.launchy.net/ Not affiliated, just a fan of both tools.
- RossM 15y agoI recently started at a small company; Google Desktop is installed on most people's machines, but people have installed it themselves, rather than IT doing so. To me, that is the definitive "I have made a user-friendly product" feeling.
- 7952 15y agoI use Google Desktop. My corporate mail is in outlook 2003, and this is what makes it usable.
- hopeless 15y agoYou're lucky. Our corporate email is Lotus Notes. The only reliable way to search it is using Google Desktop, which is what my coworker uses. I, on the other hand, copy the occasional email I need to reference into a text file
- pgroves 15y agoI actually really liked fast flip as an interface to google news. I was hoping they'd expand on that, perhaps making it an alternate interface to Reader (the Google RSS Reader). So to answer your question, an RSS reader as sound as Google Reader but with a better interface is still an unsolved problem, IMO, and FastFlip was on the right track.
- uladzislau 15y agoFast flip provided absolutely brilliant way of news browsing and skimming, I will miss it a lot as well.
- joebadmo 15y agoThis "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach sounds great to me as long as they keep trying new things. The only thing that concerns me about the approach is along the lines of what Doug Bowman said when he quit[0]: relying on data too much can blind you to what cannot be represented in data. Or, maybe, as Steve Jobs said: "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."[1] I'm optimistic that Larry Page is finding a way that comes from conviction in combination with data. [0]: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html [1]: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may1998/nf80512d.htm http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may1998/nf80512d...
- abraham 15y agoThe new design getting previewed in most Google products seems like a departure from relying on data. It is a radically different design from Google's typical fare and while they must have done focus group and internal testing it hasn't had years of AB testing evolution like the previous standard design.
- andrewtbham 15y agoI like the new design. How do you know they didn't AB test it?
- abraham 15y agoI never said it wasn't tested. I said it hasn't had the years of AB test the previous standard design had.
- MikeCapone 15y agoTo have 'years of testing', first you have to start somewhere (days, then weeks, then months), no?
- guelo 15y agoI'm not a fan of the new designs, a lot of pages now have a huge wasted whitespace header taking up big chunks of real estate. It's weird because the design in browsers has been going in the opposite direction trying to reduce the header size.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Major_Grooves 15y agoI use Desktop frequently. It's often the only way I can find things on my computer. "Desktop: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing" OK, but I'm pretty sure most files are still stored locally on most computers. I've barely ever used Windows own search feature. I hope it's up to scratch.
- abraham 15y agoThe only local files I have are the ones I haven't had time to put in the cloud yet.
- trafficlight 15y agoBut even if I have everything in Dropbox, I still need to search for documents locally.
- sliverstorm 15y agoWindow's search feature, at least if you're on 7 and you let it index what you want to search, is perfectly fine.
- arethuza 15y agoYMMV - I loathe the search in Windows 7 - which (apart from the "improvements" to Explorer) is a rather decent operating system.
- RossM 15y agoIt works for me, I don't like the 3-5 seconds of warm-up time before each search though. I mainly use it for quick-launching applications though and Launchy does a much better job of it.
- baddox 15y agoFor Windows, I recommend Everything. See this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2956146 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2956146 http://www.voidtools.com/ http://www.voidtools.com/
- hrabago 15y agoI'm surprised Google Desktop is shutting down. A lot of my coworkers use this and rely on this quite heavily. I used it a lot myself. There certainly is a need to index and search the vast amount of data that's now in our ever growing HDs. Is the search feature in the latest Windows versions capable of tackling this?
- superuser2 15y agoYes. Having used Windows 7 at work and Leopard at home, Windows 7's start menu search functionality is just as good as Spotlight. It has, like Spotlight, let me treat my hard drive like a shapeless pile and still find everything I need quickly. It's also fast enough to use as an application launcher.
- sliverstorm 15y agoIt's actually been that good for years. Google Desktop's value is mostly rooted in Windows XP.
- oskee80 15y agoI started using Everything (http://www.voidtools.com/ http://www.voidtools.com/) to help mitigate XP's slow searching and still use it today, even with Win7's much improved search functionality. Everything Search only indexes file names, so you can't search via date modified or anything like that, but it is super-fast and supports regular expressions. Need to find a word doc that begins with 'ca'? Just type '^ca.*\.docx?', instant results.
- baddox 15y agoEverything is a must-have Windows utility. It's blazingly fast (because it's searching file names only) and up-to-date (presumably because it's watching the NTFS change journal). You can also install the client on multiple networked PCs, run the "ETP Server," and search a remote computer's files, and double-clicking a result will open the SMB path to that file. I use this all the time to quickly find videos on my file server.
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- fuzzythinker 15y agoWow, $50M for Aardvark & shut down in a year. Sometimes I really don't get things like this.
- igorgue 15y agoI really liked Aardvark, and used it for a while I suspected Google was going to shut it down, thing is, they acquired a great team, that's why the $50M. I wonder if the founders stayed at Google.
- orblivion 15y agoI'll be part of the backlash if there's enough popular demand. I still think it's a great idea. There's nothing out there like having a Q/A service via IM. Maybe they can spin it off?
- alnayyir 15y agoAcquisitions are about talent and not products more often than not with Google.
- tptacek 15y agoDid Aardvark have 50 key devs? Isn't that roughly the valuation in premium talent deals?
- alnayyir 15y agoI don't know, I don't even like how the startup industry currently works. It mostly looks like a wealth transfer from the wealthy to the children of yuppies to me. I don't see much business value actually being created.
- arkitaip 15y agoI can't speak for the aardvark team but I would feel devastated having in so many years of hard work only to see my baby being terminated, not because it's a bad product but simply because it doesn't fit the broader vision of the company that acquired you. Not sure I could stay at a place like that.
- dennisgorelik 15y agoShutting down unsuccessful [enough] products is a great way to demote non-performing managers and move developers to more successful teams.
- wisty 15y agoThat's how the public service works, but only because they can't just demote non-performing managers and replace someone possibly more competent. Workers shouldn't be afraid that their project will get nixed, just because the project is run by a guy upper management wants to demote.
- dennisgorelik 15y agoBy the time when poor performance of manager is apparent it's hard to salvage anything on the project. Workers should be afraid of working for bad manager and delivering useless product. If workers avoid bad projects and bad managers that helps to protect resources from bad projects.
- LeafStorm 15y agoI think that Ninite[1] is more than up to the task of replacing Google Pack. It even lets you select what software you want. [1]: http://ninite.com/ http://ninite.com/
- X-Istence 15y agoEach time I re-install a Windows machine I search for this product for a good 20 - 30 minutes before I give up and start installing stuff by hand. The thing that kills them is their name. There is just no good way to easily remember it.
- jcitme 15y agohttp://www.google.com/#q=software+package+installer http://www.google.com/#q=software+package+installer
- mjohnst 15y agoThey should make the code open source!
- stoph 15y agoI wonder how hard it is to open source a Google product. I imagine that Google's products are heavily tied in to its proprietary solutions like BigTable.
- swlkr 15y agoThank goodness photovine isn't in that list
- chime 15y agoThey also recently shut down their free and quite wonderful dictionary.
- bane 15y agoI for one cannot fathom the twisted thought process that went into that decision. It's a lookup table with a web front end! Hosting that had to have been a barely perceptible blip in a rounding error audit. Considering Google's desire to move people to web apps (part of the justification for shutting down desktop), killing off reference material was just bizarre.
- ma2rten 15y agoMaybe it's because they want people to use google translate, which has the same functionality?
- damncabbage 15y agoIt'd be nice if they were less cutesy about the entire thing. ("Spring-Cleaning"?)
- bane 15y agoI like how they didn't mention that their translation dictionary is now deader than a doornail. My wife used it virtually every day. I'm tempted to just make one, the hosting costs and complexity for such a thing (a web server with a lookup table) must be ridiculously tiny.
- charlieok 15y agoIs that a task the google translate page isn't up to?
- bane 15y agoNo, it's not just a translation, but a translation + simultaneous lookup in a dictionary of both languages. So you'd get all of the various meanings for the word in both languages instead of just several possible words. An absolutely wonderful vocabulary building tool I haven't really seen anyplace else.
- ma2rten 15y agoYou also get several meanings as well now in Google Translate.
- bane 15y agoYou don't get meanings, you get possible translations of the word. But If I don't know what any of those words mean, that's not useful. So now I have to find a language appropriate dictionary and look each and every word up one at a time.
- suivix 15y agoIt's interesting how they're shutting down the Flash API for Google Maps. Really shows you what the trend is with Flash.
- montibbalt 15y agoWhich is kind of sad in a way. I really prefer Actionscript over Javascript :(
- mathattack 15y agoIt will be interesting to see where Google lands on the spectrum of "don't discontinue anything" and "all eggs in a few baskets". IBM did well in the former, Apple the latter. Google almost seems to be taking the role of VC. Make many bets. Some pay off. For those that don't, Google can at least keep some of the engineers.
- montibbalt 15y ago"Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps [...]" I just hope they get rid of the memory leaks in their web apps...