Google Labs no more
labs.google.com
No more cool apps that we can browse via google labs
labs.google.com
I mean, I know great people who work there, but overall it seems like they're turning into Microsoft circa 2000 - they own the industry, they buy startups and kill the products made by about half of them. Some of their products are great, but a lot of it is just an obvious monopoly enabled money grab.
I wish this wasn't the case.
The optics in this case are somewhat different.
Real artists ship - the expansion and creation of new API's in their software shows this.
Just because they can't work on whatever with 20% of their time doesn't mean it's a no-creativity nose to the grindstone environment.
Also, in spite of Apple's success I'm not sure Google would do well to emulate them. I (and I would guess many others) have loved Google because they aren't Apple, though unfortunately they do seem to be inching that way at an increasing rate.
In regards to UI, I wouldn't mind if they copied Apple more there but only if they copied the good (great defaults) without copying the bad (no ability for power users to modify the defaults).
Apple on the other hand has been very much against market research, preferring to experiment internally, killing of bad ideas before the world even hears about them and presenting a polished final product to the outside world when it's done and ready.
Both approaches certainly work, Google's works great for improving their existing suite of products whereas Apple's works better for incubating new products that consumers don't even realise they want yet.
Doodles have become a strong reason for Google search to be used in their homepage. ("Locking in a category of users").
Btw, Orkut may be the next.
What did Labs do successfully?
However, the way that they can just toss projects aside like this makes me wonder once again why I should bother becoming invested in Google Plus... how long will it be before I get an email telling me Plus is being shut down and I should go download all my content?
If you're unfamiliar with what came out of Bell Labs, check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Discoveries_and_devel...
Or is it the fate of software innovation that it is to be decentralized and happen in our spare time now?
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7...
They want to replace the entire software industry, since it's all a huge hack (especially the 100m+ SLOC codebases that are way too common). Goal: a full GUI system (from kernel to applications) in 20k SLOC. Take a look at the progress reports they've made. They claim a 200 line TCP, 800 line graphics system (apparently comparable to Cairo), and lots of other neat stuff.
That's impressive (and hard to believe). Are more informations about this available somewhere?
The software industry is also producing patents at an absurb rate, which is another byproduct of research (theoretically).
From today's announcement about Q3 results, they still get a huge chunk of their income from advertising. They are dominant, but without another angle they are just asking to be disrupted.
One advantage of having Labs back in the day was that projects could have the backing of Google's infrastructure. Now, with cloud services like AWS, the bar is set low enough that anyone has access to this kind of stuff. How hard is it to start a YouTube in this day and age?
The fact that many of the labs projects are still active made it much uneasy to find those products anymore.
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If they kill "20% time" next then we know their best days are over.
What was the most successful product that emerged out of google labs?
It's very hard to identify accurate parentage for anything developed within Google, because the culture (and innovation process) is such that ideas get proposed, refined, merged with other ideas, abandoned, resurrected in other forms, implemented, iterated upon, and finally launched, often by many different groups. Even Google Search (usually identified with Larry & Sergey) isn't really their creation: large chunks were developed by Scott Hassan (eGroups founder and never actually a Google employee, though he had a big chunk of stock), Craig Silverstein, and various other Stanford students and early employees, and the ranking algorithm was completely rewritten early on by Amit Singhal.
Oftentimes the press - or just curious Internet comments - wants a single person they can associate with a product, and so they'll take a name (usually the most famous) and make something up. That's not how it really works, though. Most ideas have many parents.
I also think they could have done much better than just redirecting it to google.com. Instead of trying to emulate Apple, they should acknowledge that their culture is different and very nerdy. So I think what they should have done instead is to highlight that and use "labs" to instead show off their technical prowess, much in they same vein as what Festo has done : http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9617.htm
A flapping wings robot, how cool is that?!
Google could really do something similar, and the world would love them for it. Instead they look more and more like a big corporation with all the boring "common sense" and mediocrity that comes with it.