Killed by Google

Is this related to "The Google Cemetery" ??

Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509735

HUGE discussion there ...

It sucks when Google kills a product I love (okay, pretty much just Google Reader), but I also like that it means Google can take risks on new products. If they didn't have a mentality of trying lots of new things, we likely wouldn't have GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs, Android, etc... not to mention new things like WayMo or Calico.

On top of that, most "dead" products aren't gone completely... there's a strong Google alternative that they're investing in.

I'm really tired of this topic, and no one has said anything remotely new or insightful on it for quite some time. Can we.. Maybe move on?

Google discontinues products if they don't meet whatever their internal criteria is for success. Some people don't like it. Some people don't care.

That's about all there is to say.

This is why Google struggles to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in the enterprise cloud space - the trust that these services will be maintained and legacy support provided just isn't there for large enterprise clients.

Half of these are either hardware products which reached EOL (just like every other manufacture, maybe besides Apple), or rebranding/merging of one product into another, or just being split out into a separate Alphabet company.

Not particularly compelling.

Google hasn't just killed products, they destroyed whole community channels with their actions, eg. RSS and nntp archives.

Even when they don't kill the service, they can increase its price so dramatically overnight that it may as well have been killed, as many who built a business on Google Maps discovered. When Google makes almost all of its money on advertising, everything else is of so little concern to them that they can kill a service or arbitrarily make a change that they expect will literally drive away 90% of its customers, and it won't matter.

Apple is that way about 3rd-party developers, too. When they make almost all of the software in-house that they hope you will use, they can make platform changes that will break others' apps and shrug it off. Their software will be prepared for the changes, and if you can't afford to keep rebuilding your product given the tiny price you have to sell it for, Apple won't notice that you're gone. Apple could probably set up a special program for about a dozen major software providers (Adobe, Google, Facebook,...), tell the rest to build web apps (as Jobs originally planned), and Apple would "bravely" get past the howls of complaint and move on mostly unscathed.

The majority of us really need to be as biased as we reasonably can be toward open systems, standards, and platforms that can't be shut down by a single, large player that has no need for our business.

I’m at least glad that there aren’t teams full of disgruntled Googlers maintaining zombie products. That is the worst for job satisfaction.

Google reader. never forget.

Thanks for sharing Killed by Google. I started it after the Inbox by Google announcement. My goal was to create a statement of criticism against churn of consumer products by Google. I think there is also a statement about closed systems that are controlled by a single player/entity, and I wanted to do it in a tongue-in-cheek form.

I’m also a developer, and I understand the product lifecycle. There are still some things wrong with the list that have been pointed out, but this is an open source project. I’m going to be editing and pruning over this weekend.

I hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving, and everyone outside the US is heading into a restful weekend.

Edit: Looks like we got removed from the top listings. If you'd like to contribute or make a suggestion, feel free to create an issue in the Github repo. Thank you all!

Most are replaced or included in some other G product.

So they do live on.

I could see someone creating a service like this for looking up discontinued products of many companies. Could be great for market research.

Definitely the best looking and most comprehensive of the three sites on this theme I've seen.

Using the term 'kill' is unnecessarily negative, IMO, especially when the site author seems to consider 'rebranding' something as 'killing' it.

Will be interesting to see how many businesses are killed by each of these products.

Excellent typography. Wish all sites were as readable.

This seems pretty misleading... I wouldn't classify Google X as "killed" when it was transformed into an Alphabet company.

Some items on this list are rather silly.

Does anybody consider the iPhone 7 as being “Killed by Apple” or was it just superseded by newer hardware?

I don't understand what they mean by killed. For example Chromebook Pixel 2 (2015) will receive updates till mid-2020.

A lot of these are pretty silly. 100% of Songza features were rolled into Google Music. Listing every phone they no longer market doesn’t make a lot of sense either. You might as well list Maps for Series 60 phones if you wanted to get down to that level.

Listing every single hardware product seems a bit dubious...

Someone on Something Awful made one too but this one looks a lot better (and is up-to-date).

https://didgoogleshutdown.com/

Some remarks required,

eg. Pixel and Pixel XL, the products were 2 years old. There is a Google Pixel 3 XL launched in October 2018. The Pixel line isn't dead. It's logical that harware gets updated and/or name changed. They changed the Nexus line as budget model to Pixel flagship model to less hurt their partners (didn't like it also though).

Google Nexus 4 / Samsung Nexus, migrated to Pixel.

Google Inbox, the product is killed, but the features are said to be partially migrated to Gmail.

Google Video Player, migrated to webm.

Project Tango to ArCode ( is mentioned there)

Google Goggles, migrated to Google Lens app.

None the less, a lot are dead and buried though. I used goo.gl a lot, but there are other services.

For RSS, i use my own RSS application: http://handlr.sapico.me/