from the which-products-were-killed-gently? dept.
A Eulogy for Every Product Google has Ruthlessly Killed (145 and Counting):
Tez. Trendalyzer. Panoramio. Timeful. Bump! SlickLogin. BufferBox.
The names sound like a mix of mid-2000s blogs and startups you'd see onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt!. In fact, they are just some of the many, many products that Google has acquired or created–then killed.
While Google is notorious for eliminating underperforming products–because even though these products often don't cost much for ongoing operations, they can pose a serious legal liability for the company–it's rare to hear them spoken of after they've been shuttered. In fact, Killed By Google is the first website to memorialize them all in one place. Created by front-end developer Cody Ogden, the site features a tombstone and epitaph for each product the company has killed since it originated.
"This project was born as an act of criticism toward a culture of software product churn. It was ignited by the announcement that Google would be killing Inbox by Gmail," says Ogden. "I've come to call it 'a place of reverence.' Like a graveyard, Killed by Google is a place to show respect for what used to exist, and to provide an opportunity for introspection about what one's digital future holds."
Throw spaghetti on the wall and see what [does not] stick?
What products have been killed by other major vendors (such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc.)? Is there a functional and/or temporal overlap?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 23 2019, @03:38AM
I wonder how many Chinese they sent to the organ harvesting buildings, or how many other global elections they've tried to steal.
Your days are numbered, Google, and when the truth comes out you will face the firing squad.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday March 23 2019, @03:51AM (3 children)
At a glance, I can't tell if any of those were proper desktop applications, but they all sound like webby, cloudy, or quasi-web "apps".
If they were proper desktop applications that didn't phone home to active or retardedly embed remote web content then it would likely still work, or could be made to work in emulators/virtualizers. Yea, yea, some things need a server or communications component, but really, anyone who invests time in a "web based" or "cloud" word processor is a moron and has no idea why personal computing came about.
Which reminds me, has anyone made a proper bit-torrent or FTP compilation of the Infoworld and/or other computer magazines available on Google Books? Some of those are simply invaluable, but Google Books seems a tad neglected and it would not surprise me at all if it joins the list of killed products.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday March 23 2019, @05:27AM (2 children)
I've been looking for scanned copies of Mondo 2000 but nobody seems to have bothered.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23 2019, @03:28PM (1 child)
are you serious
i tried to scan one and my scanner refused and called me names and made my computer crash. it refused to participate in prolonging the existance of something that could best be described as oversaturated hipster tech.
mondo 2000 was a tryptamine dream, they later turned it into wired or something. you should take different drugs now and move on.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23 2019, @04:23PM
To be fair, your computer reacted the same way when you tried to use Windows Hello.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Yaa101 on Saturday March 23 2019, @04:36AM
The products are merely a way to get the tech and the data, they didn't threw that away, they just got rid of the collateral
No comment...
(Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Saturday March 23 2019, @06:17AM (2 children)
A lot of these are really stretching reality.
> Killed about 4 years ago, Google Glass was a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display and camera that allows the wearer to interact with various applications and the Internet via natural language voice commands. Glass now only lives on as Enterprise Product. It was almost 2 years old.
Uh, so it's not really dead, is it?
> Killed 7 months ago, Google Goggles was used for searches based on pictures taken by handheld devices. It was almost 8 years old.
I believe this was just rebranded as Google Lens? If every time something is renamed constitutes a "death", no wonder this list is long.
> Bites the big one in 10 days, Inbox by Gmail aimed to improve email through several key features. It was almost 4 years old.
This was always advertised as an experiment. I mean, we all know that people are stupid and even if you tell them a feature is beta or not supported people are going to build mission critical workflows around them, but still.
> Killed 7 months ago, Tez was a mobile payments service by Google, targeted at users in India. It was rebranded to Google Pay. It was 11 months old.
Yet another rename.
> Killed over 1 year ago, Project Tango was an API for augmented reality apps that was killed and replaced by ARCore. It was about 3 years old.
And another.
> Killed over 1 year ago, Portfolios was a feature available in Google Finance to track personal financial securities. It was over 11 years old.
So we're also counting features as products now?
> Killed over 2 years ago, Project Ara was a modular smartphone project under development by Google. It was almost 3 years old.
Under development, so it wasn't even released yet. Every single R&D project counts I guess.
> Killed over 7 years ago, Google Labs was a technology playground used by Google to demonstrate and test new projects. It was about 9 years old.
Literally a directory listing experiments counts as a product killed?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23 2019, @10:13AM (1 child)
yes, everything counts. google has a responsibility to the future to maintain and support all of the useless shit that nobody will ever use, and it will never be ok to rename things.
it's in the book.
that I'll write.
when I get a gap inbetwen maintaining all of my useless shit that nobody will ever use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23 2019, @02:33PM
The problem is that they show little commitment to anything except invading users' privacy. They probably won't bother to finish basic functionality and often times kill software with little warning whether or not there are alternatives
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday March 23 2019, @12:47PM (1 child)
How about killing search? Fifteen years ago, I used to be able to use Google to find anything on the internet -- even consistently find a specific page with a couple rare search terms.
Try that now, and you never know what BS links will come up depending on what the AI algorithms decide you must really want, even if they don't fit your search, don't even contain your search terms, even contain words that the AI assumes are synonyms but aren't.
Google is no longer a search engine -- it's a social media device that feeds you more of what it thinks you want (and what it's advertisers want you to have), regardless of what you asked for. That's not "search." It's like a personal assistant that badly guesses what you want -- Alexa or Siri or "OK Google" making up BS answers without understanding (in the normal human sense) anything you say.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday March 23 2019, @10:59PM
This is the worst part of what they have become. We could forgive a lot of evil if the search just worked as well as it once did. Mind you, Google did it with far more finesse than Yahoo did, but they can still be regarded as having "shrunk" the internet. Google gained its place by bringing the world to our PC's, now you have to sift through pages of corporate friendly results mixed with pages of useless search term aggregators. Sadly, the alternatives are not much better, the best one can do is something like Duck Duck Go, where one settles for just not being tracked as ruthlessly. The search results are not much better.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Saturday March 23 2019, @01:53PM
I'm told by small business owners often: "my [insert business here] needs [insert product] - ooooh Google has that! For free!" (sometimes free). I'm usually saying: "Run! Run like it's a plague! If you don't turn back now, you'll eventually be scrambling to turn back later before they hit the delete key!"
I have a old domain wrapped up in GSuite (I think it's called now, I rarely use it) and I'm waiting for the day they tell me "enough, you're gone, later." Ridiculous how much stuff they kill off, not because it's useless (Many, many people maybe using it, i.e. Reader) but because of bottom lines despite Google being far from broke.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 23 2019, @02:43PM (2 children)
Every operating system except the current versions, and those are going down eventually as well, barring a huge (and entirely unlikely, in my view) change in the culture of planned obsolescence that overwhelmingly pervades tech from software to hardware.
--
I dream of a world where chickens can cross the
road without having their motives questioned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23 2019, @05:28PM (1 child)
The diff seems to be
Google product killed 'millinos still using it'
MS product killed 'dozens still using it and there is a better alternative'
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 23 2019, @06:02PM
Windows XP more-or less current info... [windowslatest.com]
...that's really not in the range of "dozens."
Anyway, I was actually more thinking of Apple's hardware-related OS abandonment policies, because that's what I have personally faced on a regular basis. I only have XP running in a VMWare VM. Works fine. :)
--
Don't anthropomorphize my t-shirt.
It hates that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @03:03PM
Most ideas are shit, accepting your baby is actually garbage and dumping it is laudable.
Even the shittiest idea will attract deeply loyal users if you can get enough people to try it, that's no reason to think it's good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @02:55PM
It died with the crappy new email is a chat window overhaul.
I liked the original gmail :(