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Comment by duked | Hacker News Reader

To me it sounds more like they are shutting down services that can't be monetized :/

Or services that have no future? SMS search is a dead man walking in 2013.

Not in lots of countries.

Nearly every single country is moving to smartphones. At wildly different rates and current penetration, but the vast majority of the world is going to be on smartphones in the near future. Companies who focus on the present and are obsessed with backward compatibility will inevitably find themselves behind more forward thinking companies.

Even in the US, data coverage isn't even to 50% yet. In the developing world, electricity coverage can't support phones with less than 1 week of battery life. Both of these things are hard technical problems and I don't see them being solved any time soon. Smartphones are promising, but they haven't proven themselves as reliable enough to properly replace dumber phones.

Revenue wise, there is still a lot of money to be made on SMS, even in countries like the US where smartphones are king. SMS aggregators and gateways still make significant amounts of money, and it's not decreasing.

Google is already one of the leading companies in the world at providing technologies for smartphones. Shutting down SMS search does not help them in that regard one bit. All it does it remove a useful service from the world.

SMS access is useful regardless of whether your handset is smart or dumb. SMS traffic often gets through when data cannot, either because of signal strength or circuit capacity. I have successfully used Google SMS search from my smartphone when it could not load Google.com in the browser--once to find the nearest hospital when dealing with a dangerous medical situation on a hiking trip. Better hope the 3G/LTE coverage is better in the backcountry now, I guess.

This is terribly short-sighted decision by Google.

it's a "dead man walking" everywhere. SMS has no future except death. in some regions that death will come later than others but that doesn't mean we're going to see a great SMS resurgence any time in the near future. nobody cancels their data plan and gets SMS instead.

Well, there are a few exceptions. I did. The tiny amount I use my cellphone I can't really justify a data plan.

Whenever I want to send something to someone I know, it's an SMS. I can't imagine going into my browser, going to the facebook website, copying and pasting my long password in from the keepass app, looking their name up, opening the message interface....

When I can just click the SMS button, click their picture and go.

People may not cancel their data and get SMS instead but I don't really see SMS going away in any sort of a hurry.

Cancelling my data as soon as contract is up :).

Looks like it's a big chance to make a startup based on big-company closed service. E.g. Feedly is a good option.

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