A eulogy for every product Google has killed (145 and counting) | Hacker News Reader

A eulogy for every product Google has killed (145 and counting)

fastcompany.com

44 pointsbookofjoe32 comments

Wow, a lot of these are ridiculous or silly. I welcome corrections to my list. If you object and think it should be listed as Dead, that's fine, that's your opinion, and I respect it. To me, some of these are absurd to list as Dead. Here's my list:

Tez was rebranded, it didn't die.

Encrypted Search basically replaced unencrypted search.

Chromebook Pixel, yeah, now it's a Pixelbook.

Google Showtimes, yeah, now it's built in to search.

Google Nexus, yeah, now it's Pixel phones.

Nexus Player, yeah, now it's Chromecast / Android TV / Aria.

Google X, it was re-orged, and not consumer-facing anyway.

Picasa is kind of odd to complain about, because Google Photos is better in almost every way.

Google Play edition of Android phone, yeah, phone models go away all the time.

Google TV is kind of odd to complain about, because now there's Chromecast / Android TV, and Youtube TV.

Google Chrome Frame, we should celebrate IE dying.

Nexus Q, yeah, it's now Chromecast / Android TV.

Google Chart API is still running, unless I'm mistaken.

Google Video... Yeah, now it's YouTube. Why are we complaining about this?

Google Sky Map was donated and made open source, is now "Sky Map". This is a victory.

Noop Programming Language. Come on. It was literally two engineers. I'm all for holding Google accountable for killing things we love (Google Reader, chief among them), but this is ridiculous. It's also open source.

Google Dictionary, it's not folded in to Search.

Google Real-Time Search is basically folded in to Search, right?

Google Hotspot is now folded in to Maps, right?

Google Ride Finder is now folded in to Maps, right? At least Uber and Lyft are, right?

Grand Central is basically rebranded as Voice, right?

Google Page Creator is basically Google Sites, right?

Writely became Google Docs, right?

Great points, this list is ridonkulous.

Tech companies quit, rename, reorganize and merge products all the time. Is Google particularly worse than other tech firms?

I can think of some pretty big Microsoft pivots, and I don't begrudge them their choices at all.

Media Center

Kinect

Zune

PlaysForSure DRM

Microsoft Money

Windows Home Server

Microsoft Kin Phone

Microsoft Mobile, previously known as Nokia

Windows 10 Mobile

The Band

TechNet

Hotmail

Live Messenger

Live Mesh

Groove Music Pass

Android and iOS versions of Groove Music

Encarta

Windows Small Business Server

Flight Simulator

Microsoft Works

Microsoft FrontPage

Windows Embedded Automotive, formerly Microsoft Auto, Windows CE for Automotive, Windows Automotive, and Windows Mobile for Automotive

Direct link: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Encrypted Search is listed as "Killed" because Google started redirecting encrypted.google.com to the homepage... now all queries are encrypted by default, instead of only those originating from that subdomain [1].

I'd say that's an upgrade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search#Dedicated_encryp...

I feel like some of these are stretching it..

For example, it lists the Google Glass OS and Google Glass separately - and the latter is still an enterprise product.

Hardware models are listed (Nexus phones, Chromecast Audio, Chromebook Pixel)

My 2013 Google Glass (consumer — not enterprise — version) still works perfectly: doesn't this mean Glass & Glass OS haven't been killed?

Classic Google Sites will be discontinued in 2021: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/google-sites-im...

Who uses classic sites? It's more like a v1 to v2 forced upgrade than a shutdown.

Next up: Stadia.

I asked in the Stadia announcement thread "How many years until its canceled and our game libraries erased from all existence?" I got downvoted and someone likened my comment to making fun of the fat kid at the gym. I was like, when did this become hail corporate? Its not like Stadia is some type of new year's resolution, but then again, Google will probably drop it as quickly if it becomes unprofitable.

Since my beloved Zeit has decided to go all Lambda, I need to move my hosting somewhere. It struck me that even though Google is a very big player here, I am worried that they might do something similar so I am much more inclined to look at AWS or Azure. This, I guess, is a price they are paying for this culture of exploration and pivots that I otherwise consider healthy in many ways.

They've just recently announced Stadia, a streaming gaming platform. Industry veterans immediately gave the product a 2 year lifespan.

I came here to make a similar comment. Google has the institutional attention span of a goldfish and I'm going to wait a few years to see if they actually stick with Stadia before getting my hopes up.

It is considered a pretty big deal in the gaming industry, specially if they do leverage all the YouTube infrastructure they have like they say. We will see about that one.

Maybe to some, but PC gamers are averse to not owning their games. The input latency is also very obvious, which is not good for high paced games (of which all of the top games right now are).

PC gamers haven't really ever owned their games in the whole Steam era. Most are too young to even be aware that buying a game anonymously and being able to resell it later was an ability that we used to have.

You're right about the latency being a problem. I wouldn't touch Stadia but I believe many will and it's one more compromise people will accept in exchange for convenience.

PC gamers are a tiny minority of computing device owners. This is for people with phones.

Normally I would agree, but Microsoft and Sony especially have similar services and they seem to be doing well enough.

Quit the circlejerk.

Yeah, Google shuts off unpopular, unsuccesful projects. So what? Most of the ones listed are literally useless and/or outdated relics of the past which have been replaced by something better. Google is a business after all, not a charity. They don't want to maintain an useless project from 2005 written using who knows what technology stack.

If Stadia becomes mainstream and acquires a lot of users, they won't kill it off as it will be profitable. If it has an user count of 500 in two years, it will be gutted, why support an unprofitable product?

Google has purchased and killed off numerous profitable companies. They've killed off Hangouts, Allo, Gchat, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few wildly popular chat services only to replace them with inferior products. They've killed off Google Reader which someone built a clone of and appears to be making a profit. They killed off Google Fiber, Nexus, and Glass all solid hardware that many people are/were still using. The point is you can't trust Google to not just drop something at a moment's notice, even if it's older or profitable, try getting help from them as well good luck finding want kind of support unless you happen to know someone inside the company personally. As a business they are hard to work with and notoriously flaky, I'd always choose to go elsewhere now after years of being a Google advocate. They're even looking to replace Android so what can you trust from them?

Neither Nexus nor glass was killed.

Nexus became pixel. Glass never left beta and is still an enterprise product.

Nexus and Pixel are very different. They are both phones but the market and strategy is not the same.

In what way?

The major differences are that Google is more involved with pixel hardware design than nexus (probably a good thing), and that pixels are more expensive (which follows the market price for flagship phones).

They both fill the niche of first-party flagship devices with the "pure, as google intended" (or something) android experience.

it’s not about being a charity. that is extreme. it is about not understanding how to grow products. they seem to have no idea how to do this. for example, look at the recent gmail update, which is still objectively worse than it was before. so google releases some product with a big fanfare, doesn’t grow it, and then kills it. since this happens more often than not, so people have become wary of it.

I don't think it's a bad thing for a company to try out new products and services to see what sticks, then kill off ones that aren't working, the alternative is to stagnate and slowly die out. It does sting as a consumer when something you use is killed off.

Some of these were killed off because the functionality was added to other products. I was an Inbox user until the app warned me it would be discontinued recently, but all the features were added to the Gmail app.

Except Inbox was so much better. Gmail is so heavy for what I want from email. Also, Inbox grouped emails related to a trip and showed a summary of the trip, from what I can see Gmail doesn't do this.

Its too bad there isnt someone like Lenovo that buys up all the giants scraps and squeezes some milk out of them.

At least it gives an opening to someone else to try to fill the need if it was useful.

> someone else to try to fill the need

There aren't many Google Products that I really missed (or even used) that are on that suspicious site[0] (and echoed by a news source w/o verification) except for Reader.

You are right: for Reader, someone didn't just fill the need, many different someones filled that need. Honestly didn't miss a beat when Reader was shut down. The alternative, non-BigTech solutions, have been awesome.

[0] I say suspicious because the coder acknowledges that he created the site out of anger over Inbox. As a result, he has lost objectivity and it shows.

Up to 147 now

don't really like when they kill good products, but was hoping dart will soon be on the list

I have never used dart, but always thought it looked interesting. Can I ask what you don't like about it?

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