"Desktop: I used it for a while, then found Everything (http://www.voidtools.com/ http://www.voidtools.com/) which is far faster and more responsive. " At the

"Desktop: I used it for a while, then found Everything (http://www.voidtools.com/ http://www.voidtools.com/) which is far faster and more responsive. " At the time it was discontinued. Microsoft had made it next to impossible to build your own desktop search. In particular, it was nearly impossible to turn off the indexing service they built (and required user intervention), making GDS slow, and they also started blocking/changing the API's GDS was using to make it fast. So basically, Google killed it because they didn't think they could keep making it good. (Nowadays, i'm pretty sure you could do it again, but ... Also, humorously, your link gets connection refused for me :P) "Health: I didn't use this directly, but many of us in the healthcare industry were looking to see how Google could shake things up. Apparently, PHI is hard and Google discontinued their service." Everyone who didn't get out of this (IE MS) has only avoided doing so to avoid looking bad (When i was hiring in DC, i used to get tons of resumes from people at these services, all saying "they won't kill it completely, but they are not investing it in anymore so i want out"). From what i know, the industry is just too much of a mess and regulatory environment too weird for most companies to be significantly successful here right now. "Voice: It hasn't been discontinued yet, but I feel certain this will be the next big product to go. The service (and app) hasn't been updated in years, there is no clear monetization strategy aside from international VOIP calling (which other applications do better), and the messaging portion is mostly covered by cellular carriers as "visual voicemail" with the widespread use of smartphones." Go in what sense? As a separate product? I could see that. The functionality? ISTM the likely result here is that it just becomes part of hangouts or whatever.