I know we bash Google for discontinuing services here a lot.
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.
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.
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?
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/...
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.
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.
Well... that worked.
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.
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.
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.
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.