The Google Cemetery – A list of dead Google products and why they died
gcemetery.co
gcemetery.co
/* evil! how this this happen */ \I'd hate to be the poor soul who encounters this error message and finds no information about it except the source code.
Specifically, the branch is only reachable if the PID is not what was expected, or the location that the macro was supposed to longjmp to is not set, which would be fatal defects.
Debian Code Search doesn’t crawl, but it indexes all software in Debian, which is typically helpful enough :)
I guess code search is just too niche with no marketability to ever improve
There's also at least one version of the OpenCart admin search which was designed so poorly that it didn't actually search based on whether the term was anywhere in the page title/content, but whether the title started with the search term (I think they'd screwed up the MySQL syntax). That was interesting.
Either way, search on a system not designed as a search engine is usually okay at best, absolutely terrible at worst.
A lot of ordinary British things are seen in the U.S. through a filter of... let's call it "quaintness."
Swear words. Thatched roofs. Music on AM radio.
So, yeah. Whatever offensive word you heard probably didn't have the same impact on the other side of the Atlantic. There's probably some reciprocity, too.
Brits have their own quaintness filter for some of the words that NorthAms see as out of bounds.
You can still use it as an outsider to search Chromium:
https://cs.chromium.org/search/?q=%5Cb%5BA-Z0-9._%25%2B-%5D%...
Considering that one can't 'index by regex', I wonder how the backend works - does it actually run the regex against every source code line in the repository in a few hundred milliseconds? Sounds expensive! They must have thousands of machines! Maybe thats why they don't have a public codesearch tool for the whole internet...
I definitely bemoaned the demise of Google Reader.
But if this list is complete, it's really not so bad, considering the size and age of Google.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google...
...and I suspect there’s many that aren’t listed at Wikipedia.
Really? Allo is(was) a great little chat app. Why would anyone hate it apart from the fact it is yet another chat application.
It's not that I hate Allo, I just prefer Hangouts. That might seem orthogonal, but a part of me worries that at some point in the future Hangouts will be deprecated in favor of Allo.
Yeah, Reader should have stuck around. But half of these I've either never heard of or only faintly remember. And the ones I do remember seem like reasonable axes.
Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?"
So Google's huge and had to cut off some redundant services over the years. So what. In view of privacy violations, military tech collaborations, and so on, EOL-ing a couple dozen services is hardly a cardinal sin.
Google Video predated the Youtube acquisition. For me it was a marker of how very large companies suck at innovation. Here was Google, having their lunch stolen by a startup, in epic fashion.
YouTube still won, largely for the social/commenting/vlogging features, which is part of why it was such a big deal when YouTube users became the basis of Google+ (with its real name policy).
Video hosting is a substantially different product. I don't see why Google should have owned it more than any other web company at the time, including YouTube itself.
Google already owned Blogger at that time, and I think with some hindsight you can say they always had a half-hearted interest in things "social". YouTube has a large social component of course. That is obvious now, but you could have easily imagined something less social back then.
The whole military runs on Windows, Exchange, Office. AWS runs major data centers for them. RedHat, IBM, Intel ... who hasn’t done work for the military or intelligence apparatus?
I think back then they had a very good chance to outgrow facebook and lead the "open web" forward. Instead they went all in with G+ and its early variants.
Now they have to work with facebook to index its content.
By measure of "cool kid technological fore-runner" IBM has been dead since the early 80s.
Or perhaps more hilariously:
reminder that google wanted to sell to excite.com for $750,000, excite.com said no.
All i wanted to say is that dying is not related to market value.
Die as in bankrupt or not profitable is a big stretch for its use as a metaphor. Im not sure how to put this without sounding patronizing and/or stupid and/or explaining to retards but:
There are more things in life besides money or economical viability.
One could argue that afk it is way more easy to use it metaphorically to stereotype those that have money than those who do not.
They're comparable in profit to Oracle, Alibaba and Tencent.
GM and Micron have ridiculously low PE ratios. That also says nothing about whether their businesses are at risk of dying.
Inbox was good because it was not Gmail, not because Gmail lacked features from it.
Other specific features are missing that help with email fatigue. As far as I know, there's no way for me to tell gmail to group a set of emails together and only alert / show them to me once per day at a certain time, like you can with Inbox. I can't create custom bundles to hide large groups of emails I don't want to accidentally bury other content (without actually removing them from the inbox). Gmail kind of has the "tabbed inbox", but you can't configure the categories with the flexibility that bundles had. In Inbox, I feel like I can control how much email interrupts me without also missing anything important. I don't get this same feeling with gmail.
The Inbox product as a whole had a strong focus on trying to reduce the interruption of your email and keep your inbox clean. While gmail has taken in some of the features, it hasn't absorbed the core goal of the project.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/...
Well... that worked.
Who here knows what Dodgeball, Jaiku, Sidewiki or Fast Flip were?
Hell, to be honest, even within the valley, I often meet people that don't even know what more "popular" products like Wave or iGoogle were.
All these has real consequences. Other day I was looking to buy a movie and it was available on Amazon as well as YouTube, I went to Amazon because YouTube feels much more likely to shutdown it’s movie business on a whim while Amazon will likely fight out to last moment. Same goes for buying music.
In other words the list is padded IMO. Services that actually shut down like Wave for Google+ or Reader are in a different category than services who just became part of some other product.
But the discontinuations at Google? Gone gone gone. I can't even keep a copy around for my own use. That's one reason why I dislike web applications.
"why dead? - Google Wave was discontinued because there just weren’t enough active users. The IP was later transferred to Apache when the development was discontinued."
Kinda. But more accurately, there weren't enough active users because Google __completely__ botched the beta. In restricting the invites then prevented already establish groups for trying it. For example, if you have a group of 4 or 5 and not as many invites, it was no go.
Keep in mind, Wave was pre-Slack. The market was there. It was primed. It was waiting for something smart and collaborative. Yet Google did the one thing you don't want to do with a team-centric tool...intentionally leave out at least one team member.
It also had a replay feature. So if you had someone jump in the middle of a discussion, they could rewind, replay and see how it happened. As subtle as that might seem just queues and context help understand - the knowledge and the people / group.
Those were what I remember thinking "this is The One" only to see them walk away too soon.
File under: great idea! Poor execution.
The latter was so bad I'm still surprised no one else picked up the idea and ran with it. It wasn't the idea that failed. It was the brand / company / org that conceived it.
Wave was a leap forward. Slack maybe a baby step.
It was a pretty exciting concept to me that ALL of my interactions for various disqus-like random posts, emails, blog comments, forum replies etc - could be handled from the Wave client.
But they realllly bodged the roll out. First it was the "developer-version" where everyone could pile-on - and it was madness. You could actually "reply all" to EVERYONE. Like sending a @everyone slack message to every slack channel! Chaos!
Then they went to the"invite-only" phase - and suddenly the whole thing became a ghost-town, and there was no incentive to open your wave client.
I wish they had have nailed it, because I'm positive there was a good idea underneath it.
With G+ it was "didn't they learn anything from Wave?"
The feature was later picked up by Google Docs, where it is quite useful.
Live typing was a horrible idea too; it looked like it was there just to show they could do it (it was somewhat impressive at the time that you could do that on a website).
It's I think the prototypical example of over-thinking, over-engineering.
Most successful things are essentially simple.
Slack is embarrassingly simple.
... it's simple, and getting quality, end-to-ed experience, and getting 'the small things' right, and maybe being great at some things while forgoing others, i.e. 'having an opinion' or 'focusing on a segment'.
I remember not being able to explain wave to anyone ...
But in terms of usefulness and delivering something that is truly useful and enabling of collaboration? Then in the Wave v Slack battle, Wave wins. Being able to describe Slack, doesn't mean it's useful. (Note: I'm not saying that simple doesn't help with traction. It does. I'm putting the actual products toe to toe.)
Don't get me wrong. Slack is great (if your alternative is email) but it's not the end in that space; at least I hope not. If you were to sit down and ask, "What if...What would a next Slack look like?" you'd likely end up with something close to Wave.
Today? What is Wave? It's all the things you wish Slack was ;)
Google has the brand power to get as many people as they want using something, and it's free - and people chose not to use it.
Conversely, slack was a tiny startup with no marketing budget, to start, and people are actually paying $ for Slack - so that means a lot.
More and more we read about people / teams de-Slacking. why? Because it's just not delivering the value they need. It's effective __ but only to a point__, and then it becomes the bottleneck. Yes, it's a great screwdriver, provided you don't need a hammer.
I'm not disputing Slack is a more mass market product - just like USA Today is not The Economist. Wave was a new, different, and I'm maintaining arguably better way to look at team comms / collaboration / building a knowledge graph.
Let's not confuse Google's cluster-fucking the execution of the rollout + marketing with the value of the idea itself.
Google had the power, yes. But they botches the beta. The sad thing, they did the same for G+. That is, they didn't learn from Wave.
That said, Wave beta was a mess of "uh? aha... mmm?"
"Google __completely__ botched the beta. In having an open invite, they were unprepared for load. Since it was a brand new system, with a ton of interested users, the system completely bogged down. This was completely predictable with a new protocol, a new app, and Google's prestige. Why they didn't restrict the beta is beyond me."
You absolutely cannot have a group-based system that does not immediately allow a full group to join.
Can you imagine if Slack relied on invites?
It's worth noting that even as someone who frequents tech and hackernews frequently, I still didn't know what half the stuff on there was. Things like Dodgeball, Jaiku, Gears, Fast Flip, Urchin or Aardvark. Never even heard these names before.
Thank you Google of yore for creating and running a great service for as long as you did!
Would love to know what’s your setup on the go.
The app isn't updated all that often, but then again, it doesn't really need it.
I wouldn't characterize it as a "software error". It was a security vulnerability.[0]
[0] https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-s...
Guess I better tell my mom, she’s just started using it, the low user count is actually a good feature for her, doesn’t like the “noisiness” of other platforms
EDIT: Also, only the consumer side is shutting down. G+ for G-Suite will still exist.
So if you're a major game developer, should you use this for a long-running game? The Google connection adds business risk. It probably won't be a major moneymaker for Google, and there's a good chance they'll drop the offering in two or three years. Then what? It comes with Google-type terms and conditions, the usual "Google can do anything they want". Drop the product, raise the price, cut off your service because you're doing something that competes with some Google interest, that kind of thing.
But you are correct. Taking dependency on Google services like maps, offers, product search and other APIs have previously bankrupted few folks. Also, as a user I avoid buying stuff like movies, music, storage space, photo storage etc because it could just disappear tomorrow.
My read on it is that it was never intended to be a consumer project as soon as they launched it (which explains the lack of polish), but the high level of interest when it was announced convinced them to launch it as one just in case they had stumbled on the next big thing. When that failed to materialize, they dropped it back to a research and enterprise project as was initially intended.
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857120
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front
They were quite helpful in getting about a decade worth of gmail data out of there when I decided I didn't want to use gmail anymore.
(That's my personal guess at least, not related to that team)
And then Google+ was sunsetted and machine learning and other built in features are doing a better job of prospering than any other Google properties.
Google was always a nerd company. Creating social platforms was always an SMH move.
However the web interface and search results are a true PITA. Waiting for the page to load just to jump to a random point in the page takes in the order of 5+ seconds on my system.
I remember the first iteration of groups was almost pure html and insanely fast. Like with most google products, it has been bloated to death.
They later added their own group stuff to it, and google group search became this weird mismash between the two. Searching usenet was easier and faster 10 years ago.
[0] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/03/google-graveyard-does-exi... [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...
Talk was lightweight, history backups and usable in every platform.
Any startups would love to have Talk
and Google Reader ... from the top of my head, and some enterprise products if I am not mistaken
Maybe the list only includes B2C products.
I'd be more worried if Google tried to do everything. We're human and finite, after all.
I think the bigger issue is the features google removed or modified from some of its products; like my biggest miss is true verbatim search.
Around 2001, Google had a nifty toll free phone service, kind of like 411, but better. You it was an early voice recognition system that would even connect your call to the business you were trying to find. I think it was called Jupiter, but a cursory search doesn't turn up anything. I miss that too.
Search engines for BSD and Linux topics in the earliest days of Google. These were very popular with the Slashdot crowd, which was probably responsible for the initial succsss of Google.
1) Many of these products rely on internal infrastructure and/or hosting that isn't readily available outside of Google. (They're basically built on a sort of internal Google "cloud" that has access to code not available outside Google.)
2) It would cost more money than the product reasonably makes to both move the product off the Google infrastructure/codebase AND find a team willing to continue to develop it.
Remember, most of these products didn't really make any money; they were internal projects that released externally and had fan clubs.
Not sure, but there seems to be a bit of a contradiction between your point 2) and the last sentence of your comment.
But as I said, just a crazy idea ...
Migrating our whole corp password management to a new platform right during the busy time of year has been a nightmare.
(unfortunately it hasn't updated in a while and said SA poster may not have had the best insight into google product lifetimes)
Wave was everything Slack __still__ isn't.
You couldn't participate in a wave unless you were on wave. (The spec was open, but obviously in the early days there were no other implementers. Also the non-open UI made a big difference).
I really thought they were going to fold wave into gmail, so that everyone on gmail would automatically be able to participate in waves and access them through the same interface as they did their emails. That would have been amazing. It was also just outgrowing its initial crashiness when they killed it.
I thought they were taken from Etherpad (which Google bought and killed)?
I find it puzzling and ironic how difficult it is to find a Google product. They should have a Google product search somewhere in the apps menu in the browser.
Also, next to zero marketing.
GWT is a web presentation technology that has (so far) had a 12-year run. That's like a million dog years. Backbone is 8 years old, Ember is 6 years old, Angular1 was a flash in the pan... jQuery is the same age as GWT, but it's waning as well.
I really don't think GWT devs have much to complain about. React developers should be so lucky in another ten years. Frontend technologies just don't have much shelf life.
People wrote stuff on top of each one of those “overengineered crap” pivots.
It’s nice that a transpiler still sort-of exists but that’s of little use to people that built out products on the platform. And of course the back-compat story has always been terrible because google.
Also it’s was a java framework pitched at java developers. Swing is still supported and applets were fully supported (not hived off to some moribund open source foundation) for more than twenty years.
I was doing gwt development in the wave era. I saw all the crazy new mvvpvmvwhatever stuff and just avoided it. App worked great.
I don't use gwt today but I keep an eye on it every now and then. The transpiler is waaaaaay better now than it was in the wave era. The only thing missing is a modern widget framework.
I don't expect gwt to make a major comeback, but it wouldn't surprise me too much of it did. It (still) does a few things far better than the current crop of JS frameworks.
Last thing: it would also be interesting to see if the death rate is increasing or declining over time: a higher death rate indicates a healthy org still experimenting.
The Dodgeball saga seems like a good case study: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/eric-schmidt-google-dodgeb...
It's as if Google is simply too big to realize what a good idea is and support it.
Ads made Google one of the most profitable companies in the world basically overnight. No one's passion project will ever look good against that measuring stick.
Picasso is also a good photo viewer when I was using Windows. It's a shame really.
For hints I would be thankful. Requirements: Must work offline, must store face information in the picture (XMP). Must work with ~1 TB of pictures. Digikam unfortunately sucks. Bad face recognotion and bad UI.
I cannot believe it's true. My understanding is with a news aggregator like it Google cannot control the news feed like it does with Google news.
Please sign this guy's petition if you don't want it to happen.
>After March 30, 2019, all links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.
Source: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-goog....
Not that the world was wanting for yet another url-shortener.
I miss that service.
Used to love the company and what the people there stood for. Crazy how things have changed.
Aperture Shake Sherlock iSync ClarisWorks/AppleWorks (iWork seems to be a different beast) HyperCard WebObjects iDVD iChat (iMessage was never an AIM client)
It was only discontinued for consumers. It's still part of paid G Suite, it just focuses on sharing posts and topics within a company now -- something it's actually pretty good at. [1]
I wouldn't call it a "dead Google product" by any means.
They also sometimes lack imaginations, namely cancelling Reader instead of morphing it into some sort of G+. That plus AMP would have given FB a run for their money.
Maybe it's because their goto is analytics and "how can monetize this?" instead of "what do users want? what do they need?"
Both of these had a sizable user-base that would have been leveraged, as opposed to G+ starting from zero.
It goes on every computer along with 7z and Zhorn Caffeine
https://web.archive.org/web/20181122170006/https://gcemetery...
I hope not anyway. They injected some time into in the last year or so. I'd be curious to know the number of users; it's still free to get a number afaict.
It's probably their least profitable service, I suppose. Maybe they'll start (!) listening in on conversations and figure out a way to make money there.
Feels easier to pronounce.
At least Mojave has the option for a dark or light UI/UX.
Tons of older/less experienced people use Gmail. It's hard enough for those kinds of people to get used to a UI/UX to start.
The best they've been able to come up with is some weird half-backed Android Messages or SMS Connect, it's not really clear. It's weird that they don't just take the ideas from iMessage and run with it.
Google would have to convince all their hardware partners to do that carrier arm-twisting themselves and most those companies don’t have any leverage to do it even if they wanted.
I like Inbox still. I was using gmail like i was using inbox before the product existed.
Oh well, when you live on the edge, sometimes you get cut. guitar riff
It could prevent "submarining" of communication into email chains and instant messaging conversations inaccessible to those not addressed or cc-ed, also preventing the time-burning, frustrating, and often incomplete "email dive" someone would have to perform to find and forward all these emails to e.g. a new team member or another interested party (new manager, legal, possibly even a third party).
Add people to the project/communications' access list(s), and they not only gained participation (without eveyone having to remember to add them to the list of addressees on new emails) but also access to the historical record.
It enabled team-level permissions for both on-boarding and off-boarding of new parties: New team members, etc -- like above. Note the off-boarding facility, in that; short of termination, if someone left a project, you (normal PM or dev lead or whatever roll) could take them off the access lists for the shared communications and you could all go your separate ways with a clean, definable and documented break.
And a bunch of stuff that's long since left my immediately accessible, conscious memory.
(Alternatives I saw did not compare. E.g. "project documentation skeletons" expanded from Lotus Notes templates, that left ginormous subtrees of "forms" that were often very sparsely, if at all, completed -- said completion being entirely, manually dependent upon the individual doing the work. Finding any bit of information in those was a giant PIA; who knows into which form they entered it, if at all, and even when they did, it was surrounded by tons of boilerplate that made it disappear into that "haystack".)
BUT...
They let front end development hang this very Javascript-heavy UI on it that bogged down "normal" machines, making the end-user experience rather miserable. That "lag" (to be generous in description), combined with a healthy dose of "mystery meat" UI.
People hated that. And they stayed away. (If you could even talk them into giving the beta a try... once they had access to the beta...)
Maybe it ran fine on internal "Core++" or whatever, ueber-motherboard and maxed RAM Google machines with local hops to the server. But no-one inside seemed to give it a good hard run in the "real world". Or to worry about said performance problems, if they did.
Well, I never got invested in it, other than hope and poking at it a bit once someone gave me access. But I continued to think, for a good long while, that the end result was a shame.
P.S. This is just my personal, outsider perspective. Maybe I have some things wrong. But it's the impression I ended up with.