A fall spring-cleaning - Google products getting shut down | Hacker News Reader

A fall spring-cleaning - Google products getting shut down

googleblog.blogspot.com

147 pointsabraham79 comments

This "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach sounds great to me as long as they keep trying new things.

The only thing that concerns me about the approach is along the lines of what Doug Bowman said when he quit[0]: relying on data too much can blind you to what cannot be represented in data. Or, maybe, as Steve Jobs said: "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."[1]

I'm optimistic that Larry Page is finding a way that comes from conviction in combination with data.

[0]: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

[1]: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may1998/nf80512d...

The new design getting previewed in most Google products seems like a departure from relying on data. It is a radically different design from Google's typical fare and while they must have done focus group and internal testing it hasn't had years of AB testing evolution like the previous standard design.

I like the new design. How do you know they didn't AB test it?

I never said it wasn't tested. I said it hasn't had the years of AB test the previous standard design had.

To have 'years of testing', first you have to start somewhere (days, then weeks, then months), no?

I'm not a fan of the new designs, a lot of pages now have a huge wasted whitespace header taking up big chunks of real estate. It's weird because the design in browsers has been going in the opposite direction trying to reduce the header size.

If you want to try lots of things failure has to be cheap, and part of cheap failure is failing fast. I think 20% time almost guarantees that they keep trying new things, though.

One of the things that made Apple successful was having a very small number of products. Having a small number of amazing products is a good way to go.

But there aren't very many people like Steve Jobs or corporate situations that allow such a person to exercise such control (no such result would come out of a committee) so this observation is of limited utility ... until you can arrange/figure out business models where you can do that sort of thing.

For a company like Google, throwing a lot of things at the wall and seeing what sticks is not the worst approach in the world, assuming they don't upset too many people in transitions (see discussions on the App Engine).

Google has gone through extensive restructuring over the last year with one or two top execs having almost complete control over their devision. I believe Google is broken down into six devisions including ads, search, social, mobile, business, and local. There might be another couple I'm missing or some of those might have been combined.

Apple has had a large number of not amazing products too. Admitting defeat is a good way to make sure your company isn't overrun with them. I think this is a good move from Google.

"A small number of good products" doesn't mean "no flops". It's a strategy, not an outcome. It means Apple doesn't make printers, not that it never ends up making the iPod HiFi.

I'm surprised Google Desktop is shutting down. A lot of my coworkers use this and rely on this quite heavily. I used it a lot myself.

There certainly is a need to index and search the vast amount of data that's now in our ever growing HDs. Is the search feature in the latest Windows versions capable of tackling this?

Yes. Having used Windows 7 at work and Leopard at home, Windows 7's start menu search functionality is just as good as Spotlight. It has, like Spotlight, let me treat my hard drive like a shapeless pile and still find everything I need quickly. It's also fast enough to use as an application launcher.

It's actually been that good for years. Google Desktop's value is mostly rooted in Windows XP.

I started using Everything (http://www.voidtools.com/) to help mitigate XP's slow searching and still use it today, even with Win7's much improved search functionality.

Everything Search only indexes file names, so you can't search via date modified or anything like that, but it is super-fast and supports regular expressions. Need to find a word doc that begins with 'ca'? Just type '^ca.*\.docx?', instant results.

Everything is a must-have Windows utility. It's blazingly fast (because it's searching file names only) and up-to-date (presumably because it's watching the NTFS change journal).

You can also install the client on multiple networked PCs, run the "ETP Server," and search a remote computer's files, and double-clicking a result will open the SMB path to that file. I use this all the time to quickly find videos on my file server.

Checkout http://locate32.net it's lightweight, simple and fast. The setup takes a little know-how but once you have it running from startup and scheduling database updates it is indispensable.

Desktop is the only indexing+search tool that works in Linux. Ive tried all of them, but the search+ranking algorithms in Google Desktop _just work_. Seriously, killing G-Desktop just sent computing back to 1990.

Wow, $50M for Aardvark & shut down in a year. Sometimes I really don't get things like this.

I really liked Aardvark, and used it for a while I suspected Google was going to shut it down, thing is, they acquired a great team, that's why the $50M.

I wonder if the founders stayed at Google.

I'll be part of the backlash if there's enough popular demand. I still think it's a great idea. There's nothing out there like having a Q/A service via IM. Maybe they can spin it off?

Acquisitions are about talent and not products more often than not with Google.

Did Aardvark have 50 key devs? Isn't that roughly the valuation in premium talent deals?

I don't know, I don't even like how the startup industry currently works.

It mostly looks like a wealth transfer from the wealthy to the children of yuppies to me.

I don't see much business value actually being created.

I can't speak for the aardvark team but I would feel devastated having in so many years of hard work only to see my baby being terminated, not because it's a bad product but simply because it doesn't fit the broader vision of the company that acquired you. Not sure I could stay at a place like that.

Agreed. Why the hell buy it in the first place? Maybe they wanted some of the IP to use somewhere else or something? It doesn't smell good to me. Are we still saying 'Do no evil?'

Dude ... read the other comments. It was a talent acquisition / google changed it's strategy since. If the founders did not want to have it shutdown they should have negotiated a clause in the contract.

But don't you find it odd? It's too much to pay for just a talent acquisition. IP + talent, perhaps, if it's really important IP.

Acquisitions typically include certain vesting periods (25-25-25-25 or 10-20-30-40) and certain goals for bonuses to kick in. Press concentrates on grand total of everything vesting over N years + all targets being met.

The grand total amount of dollars that left Google's bank account is likely to be less than $50,000,000.

A shutdown like this could very well trigger accelerated vesting clauses.

Why throw good money after bad? If Aardvark is not part of Google's (evolving) vision, why continue it? If I make a wrong turn on the highway, I would turn around, even if I've drive in that (wrong) direction for an hour. :)

Google had to acquire Aardvark, otherwise Facebook would have bought them, and with the imminent launch of Google+, Google had to prevent this at all cost.

Looks like a good candidate for a re-startup like I was mentioning in the knockoff thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2954987

Spend a week working on a prototype and go tell the press you're going to pick up what Aardvark dropped. I presume the founders are busy earning out working on Google+ so they might even applaud it.

I use Desktop frequently. It's often the only way I can find things on my computer.

"Desktop: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing"

OK, but I'm pretty sure most files are still stored locally on most computers. I've barely ever used Windows own search feature. I hope it's up to scratch.

The only local files I have are the ones I haven't had time to put in the cloud yet.

But even if I have everything in Dropbox, I still need to search for documents locally.

Window's search feature, at least if you're on 7 and you let it index what you want to search, is perfectly fine.

YMMV - I loathe the search in Windows 7 - which (apart from the "improvements" to Explorer) is a rather decent operating system.

It works for me, I don't like the 3-5 seconds of warm-up time before each search though. I mainly use it for quick-launching applications though and Launchy does a much better job of it.

For Windows, I recommend Everything. See this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2956146

http://www.voidtools.com/

I like how they didn't mention that their translation dictionary is now deader than a doornail. My wife used it virtually every day. I'm tempted to just make one, the hosting costs and complexity for such a thing (a web server with a lookup table) must be ridiculously tiny.

Is that a task the google translate page isn't up to?

No, it's not just a translation, but a translation + simultaneous lookup in a dictionary of both languages. So you'd get all of the various meanings for the word in both languages instead of just several possible words.

An absolutely wonderful vocabulary building tool I haven't really seen anyplace else.

You also get several meanings as well now in Google Translate.

You don't get meanings, you get possible translations of the word. But If I don't know what any of those words mean, that's not useful. So now I have to find a language appropriate dictionary and look each and every word up one at a time.

I think that Ninite[1] is more than up to the task of replacing Google Pack. It even lets you select what software you want.

[1]: http://ninite.com/

Each time I re-install a Windows machine I search for this product for a good 20 - 30 minutes before I give up and start installing stuff by hand.

The thing that kills them is their name. There is just no good way to easily remember it.

Anyone use any of these products being shut down?

Is there an opportunity to replace any of these for a startup?

I used Google Notebook for a while, but I thought they shut it down years ago, not long after I escaped with my notes to Evernote.

It wasn't an escape if they kept it around years after you stopped using it.

I love Google notebook. They stopped developing it a while ago, but I've been using it a lot anyway. It's my favourite no-frills note taking app in the cloud. I guess now I will have to move to something else.

I would love to use a simple editor which syncs to my Dropbox text files. I've seen some apps which do that but they try too hard to be cool and go overboard with their javascript animations, making them unusably slow. I might write my own.

It is more of a todo tool but you might like http://todotxt.com/

Relatedly, the gmail tasks have a little-known fullscreen UI: https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas?pli=1 Also a mobile webapp.

There is Simplenote (http://simplenoteapp.com), which is a pretty no-frills web app that also integrates with a number of native apps (including Notational Velocity if you're on OS X).

I wrote Noogle Goatbook (http://www.nooglegoatbook.com/) 2 years ago when they first announced Google Notebook was being discontinued. It's still a little rough but I might continue working on it and/or stick it on github if people are interested.

That is the most awesome product name ever. And it looks quite good too.

It's a shame it's hosted on Google App Engine though. Given their new pricing changes, you might have to move it. Maybe you should launch Noogle Gap Engine...

Google Docs has a competing product to almost every MS Office component. OneNote is a staple to the MS Office family. I'd really like to know why Google deprecated Notebook. It was a great product.

I use Google Desktop dozens of times daily. I suspect lots of enterprise users are in the same XP boat without a fast search paddle.