List of dead Google products, services, and devices
killedbygoogle.com
killedbygoogle.com
Related discussion (lots of comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509735
At a glance...
* Nexus wasn't killed, it was re branded into Pixel. Nexus had been trending toward premium and the Pixel switch cemented that.
* Googles was more-or-less replaced by Lens. Not a pure rebrand, but two products with the same idea.
* Google Now has essentially been folded into the expanding behemoth that is Assistant. I don't care for that kind of feature, but AFAICT they're fairly similar.
* Quickoffice was an acquisition that was promptly folded into Docs/Sheets/etc.
Given the quality issues google had with Nexus phones (which was real), I could absolutely not justify spending twice the money on fake premium phones which seemingly still suffered those issue, based on reports after the Pixel 1 launch.
In comparison my Nexus 5X (launched at the same time) cost me around $350. I could literally have bought two of these instead of one iPhone (or Samsung Galaxy).
> Sparrow was an email client for OS X and iOS. They acquired and then killed it. It was over 1 year old.
Buying then killing is sad. Acquihire I guess?
> Google Reader was a RSS/Atom feed aggregator. It was over 7 years old.
These are the ones that feel like they hurt the internet. That was seven critical years for RSS/Atom. Investing time/money in building feed aggregators/readers meant competing against the might of Google and a $0 price point.
Sometimes even with almost unlimited resources (Windows phone) the plan just doesn't work out. I don't get why the tech community in general likes to harp on them for it.
"The first rule for the concentration of executive efforts is to slough off the past that has ceased to be productive. Effective executives periodically review their work programs—and those of their associates—and ask: 'If we did not already do this, would we go into it now?' And unless the answer is an unconditional 'Yes,' they drop the activity or curtail it sharply."
Drucker, Peter F.. The Effective Executive (Harperbusiness Essentials) (p. 115).
Does not sound like it was killed if it will continue to live with a new name.
The ones that worry me are aws, their technical debt would be hugggee with all those services and they keep piling it on, now maintaining their own elastic search repo!
Eventually some of the older service have to give and with there lock-in not lock-in it will hurt some -just a thought
I understand why / how people are pissed, I got pissed at some of those too, yet I do also accept my overall quality of digital life is improved by these bold moves in the long run.
Jokes aside, I am also curious about this. I could imagine them splitting it up and reusing the useful functionality in other products?
> Most of Google’s code is stored in a single unified source-code repository, and is accessible to all software engineers at Google . There are some notable exceptions, particularly the two large open-source projects Chrome and Android, which use separate open-source repositories, and some high-value or security-critical pieces of code for which read access is locked down more tightly. But most Google projects share the same repository. As of January 2015, this 86 terabyte repository contained a billion files, including over 9 million source code files containing a total of 2 billion lines of source code , with a history of 35 million commits and a change rate of 40 thousand commits per work day [18].
https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01715
Probably they just delete the directory or whatever, but it's still inside the VCS history.