I agree with you. This list actually had the opposite intended effect on me.

Yeah, Reader should have stuck around. But half of these I've either never heard of or only faintly remember. And the ones I do remember seem like reasonable axes.

Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?"

So Google's huge and had to cut off some redundant services over the years. So what. In view of privacy violations, military tech collaborations, and so on, EOL-ing a couple dozen services is hardly a cardinal sin.

> Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?"

Google Video predated the Youtube acquisition. For me it was a marker of how very large companies suck at innovation. Here was Google, having their lunch stolen by a startup, in epic fashion.

Google Video was also better technically in basically every way— the audio/video sync was better (I preferred it for posting short swing dancing clips), encoding was faster, and seeking and mid-video permalinks were better. Plus, I believe GV had a live streaming feature first.

YouTube still won, largely for the social/commenting/vlogging features, which is part of why it was such a big deal when YouTube users became the basis of Google+ (with its real name policy).

YouTube both won and lost, because it was a startup operating in the legal grey zone. It was long before most content was commercial content, commercials, music videos or other professional content most often clips or full videos of content people did not own copyright for. Sure, many people want to share their amateur content on the island with the most inhabitants. Neither Google other rivals or other startups had the gumption and survivor instinct to play this hand. If Google was the host or already owned YouTube when the DRM issues emerged and were being negotiated the copyright owners would have come after Google even harder, faster and more expensively. I say YouTube lost, because they needed to sell. When Google bought YouTube the business model and risks were better known. Months after Google purchased YouTube Viacom famously sued. By that point publishers were seeing benefits along with the costs.

That's interesting. It never occurred to me whether they were technically better. I always preferred YouTube to Google Video, just from the perspective of someone watching videos - because of the UI/UX of the site and player (didn't use any of the social features).

YouTube was VHS, Google Video was BetaMax, but this time Sony acquired JVC

I just remember the UX of Google Video being really bad.

Most of the google video tech got moved over to youtube anyway.

Why was it "their lunch" ? Back then, Google was a search company which made forays into mail and maps. Android or Chrome hadn't been released yet (and by 2005 probably barely started).

Video hosting is a substantially different product. I don't see why Google should have owned it more than any other web company at the time, including YouTube itself.

Google already owned Blogger at that time, and I think with some hindsight you can say they always had a half-hearted interest in things "social". YouTube has a large social component of course. That is obvious now, but you could have easily imagined something less social back then.

The Blogger acquisition and integration for me is a puzzle wrapped into an enigma. They paid good money for it, then froze it. They weight blogs hosted there very favourably in Search, but there is no push to get users and it emanates an aura of “this product might actually be a walking zombie”. If they don’t value the product, why don’t they push people away? If they value Blogger, why is it so frozen?

This is common theme of Evan Williams startups. He starts a company to build new blogging platform because last one sucked. Enormous amount of head spinning marketing is done to acquire millions of bloggers. Then the company is sold to suckers for few billion dollars. Most talent leaves and the sucker aquirer freezes the product in zombie state. Ev Williams then starts another blog startup because his last one sucked. Next up: Medium.com.

YT had basically won by failing. When they got purchased they had a few weeks of runway left.

Is there a single, major US tech company that hasn’t collaborated with the military?

The whole military runs on Windows, Exchange, Office. AWS runs major data centers for them. RedHat, IBM, Intel ... who hasn’t done work for the military or intelligence apparatus?

Apple?

LOL - "The Pentagon today announced a partnership with 162 companies and universities -- including" ...

Netflix?

I stand corrected.

Netflix and kill?

Snapchat?

I don't think this list is complete. Inbox is not here, and neither are the multitude of Android apps that Google kept rolling out and discontinuing (e.g. Allo).

https://killedbygoogle.com <- I got pissed after the Inbox announcement and turned it into a Hacktoberfest project. Going to prune it over the weekend to remove some of the cruft (specific phone models with clear lifecycles, etc).

I love this <3. I was going to do the same. People wonder why I don't trust Google's tech and here is the reason (and many others).

Also missing all the APIs that Google dropped over the years, which means products that depended on them stopped working.

The REST search API was one, IIRC. I think they dropped it in favor of a JavaScript API.

Allo isnt dead or otherwise discontinued, though I wouldn't be surprised to see it go in the next year or two.

Although, by that logic G+ shouldn't be on the list either. To be clear, I agree that project that are still sunsetting but not dead should probably not be there until they are fully down, just pointing out the inconsistency.

It’s defineatly not comprehensive. When PNaCL was first announced I thought the idea was interesting but Google didn’t really do anything with it and now web assembly is the thing.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/...

But Inbox got integrated into Gmail.

Gmail doesn't have feature parity with Inbox. We're losing bundles among other things :(

I really miss reminders mired with emails. Ugh.

So who cares?

Inbox was good because it was not Gmail, not because Gmail lacked features from it.

In what way?

The interface on Inbox is _much_ less cluttered. I spent an hour turning off things in gmail trying to clean it up after the announcement, and it still looks too busy.

Other specific features are missing that help with email fatigue. As far as I know, there's no way for me to tell gmail to group a set of emails together and only alert / show them to me once per day at a certain time, like you can with Inbox. I can't create custom bundles to hide large groups of emails I don't want to accidentally bury other content (without actually removing them from the inbox). Gmail kind of has the "tabbed inbox", but you can't configure the categories with the flexibility that bundles had. In Inbox, I feel like I can control how much email interrupts me without also missing anything important. I don't get this same feeling with gmail.

The Inbox product as a whole had a strong focus on trying to reduce the interruption of your email and keep your inbox clean. While gmail has taken in some of the features, it hasn't absorbed the core goal of the project.

I think it’s the UI mostly. It’s nice having all your messages categorized in bundles, grouped chronologically, then sorted by priority. With Inbox I find that I skim through way less crap to find emails that need attention.

At Wikipedia I think there’s a few more not currently listed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google...

...and I suspect there’s many that aren’t listed at Wikipedia.

Probably, but this leads down the rabbit hole on "what counts as discontinued". There's probably plenty that got killed internally before seeing a public user. Some on the Wikipedia list were more like features within a product (e.g. Latitude), some of them just morphed into products directly (e.g. real-time search, I think), and some of them were not really in a 'launched' state (e.g. Image Swirl).

I agree with you, and in my opinion Reader was the most used and most useful product on that list. Most other discontinued products were indeed underutilized (for various reasons) or outpaced by their competitors. But TBH, there are some products I wouldn't mind seeing on that list (Allo being one of them).

If you liked Google Reader, please give Inoreader a try. It's a nearly perfect clone but with useful features like filtering and following Twitter feeds.

I ended up going to TheOldReader, I'll have to check that out.

>But TBH, there are some products I wouldn't mind seeing on that list (Allo being one of them).

Really? Allo is(was) a great little chat app. Why would anyone hate it apart from the fact it is yet another chat application.

> Why would anyone hate it apart from the fact it is yet another chat application.

It's not that I hate Allo, I just prefer Hangouts. That might seem orthogonal, but a part of me worries that at some point in the future Hangouts will be deprecated in favor of Allo.

Allo is in maintenance mode. The entire Allo team has been moved over to Android Messages. Hangouts is also in maintenance mode. The 'Hangouts' branding has been repositioned to their slack-type productivity tool. Like Allo, what you know as Hangouts is dead.

Microsoft has also discontinued a lot of programs over its life, but there's one major difference---I can still use those Microsoft programs! Microsoft long ago stopped supporting MS-DOS 2.1 but I can still use it. Heck, I even have a verion of PC-DOS 1.0 around here somewhere.

But the discontinuations at Google? Gone gone gone. I can't even keep a copy around for my own use. That's one reason why I dislike web applications.

Google killed Google Reader because of Google+, if I remember correctly. To push people towards the new platform, where stories should be shared.

Well... that worked.

The irony for me is that if a company wanted to construct a strong profile of me to sell me ads, I'd have to imagine that Feedly (I switched to Feedly when Google Reader was retired) would now be one of the best placed to do that. I spend far more of my personal time there than in any other app.

Now killing G+, they can resurrect GReader :D

Google Reader is sadly missed but a few worthy alternatives cropped up. What this clubbing of Reader taught many people is that out with a few select services (GMail and Search), everything else will be clobbered eventually so don't rely on Google tools in the long term.

Indeed. I often think there's a lot of confirmation bias in the 'google kills products' complaints... Certainly many many small to medium sized, user-facing start ups have died in the same time, but we don't hear the same sort of FUD about using start up tech.

But you know Google is not a startup.

It is missing the disappearance of "don't be evil."

This is a popular meme for some reason, but "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right - speak up!" is literally the last line in the code of conduct.

Didnt Damore do just that? (I mean for his definition of "isn't right", yet isnt that the point?)

I mean, that's the point of why the code of conduct was expanded from just "don't be evil". Everyone's definition of evil is different.

It was a feature not a product.

Also, consider that several of these services still exist in one form or another.

The list is also a little unfair. Latitude didn't die, it's just a renamed and built into Google Maps. Picasa is also questionable. Google Photos does more and I end up using it more than I used Picasa. Google Talk. I guess I don't know what was lost. A chat box still appears in Gmail. Google Video seems replaced by youtube and google drive. Google Gears was subsumed into web standards.

In other words the list is padded IMO. Services that actually shut down like Wave for Google+ or Reader are in a different category than services who just became part of some other product.

Normally companies retire products because they are lightly used or have fallen far behind competition. Google kills stuff on whims. Google Reader, url shortner, code search, Picasa - all these are terrible examples of things that got shutdown.

All these has real consequences. Other day I was looking to buy a movie and it was available on Amazon as well as YouTube, I went to Amazon because YouTube feels much more likely to shutdown it’s movie business on a whim while Amazon will likely fight out to last moment. Same goes for buying music.

Not only that, but even then, half of these are super obscure projects even people in Hackernews, which are generally more tech knowledgeable, have never heard of.

Who here knows what Dodgeball, Jaiku, Sidewiki or Fast Flip were?

Hell, to be honest, even within the valley, I often meet people that don't even know what more "popular" products like Wave or iGoogle were.

Unfortunately, the list is not complete. But it's useful to demonstrate to the boss that Google isn't ready for enterprise yet.

IMHO, Google really should have evolved Reader into Google Plus. They were already part of the way there with Reader's Buzz features.

Google died when they killed reader.

I think back then they had a very good chance to outgrow facebook and lead the "open web" forward. Instead they went all in with G+ and its early variants.

Now they have to work with facebook to index its content.

Google died? A strange thing to say about a company with a market capitalisation of 722 billion USD.

Instead of “died”, I’m guessing the poster meant “irrelevant”.

Is that any more true (other than subjectively)?

Because 'market capitalisation' is the only life possible and without it everything is irrelevant ?

Eh a dying whale is still dying. Google missed the cloud and is next in line for the privacy burner (see Facebook) they arent even in the top 3 by market value anymore.

Facebook is dead too? Outside of top 3 by market value = "dead"?

IBM earned $13 billion in operating income over the prior four quarters, making them one of the most profitable companies on earth. They're not even remotely close to being at risk of actually dying.

They're comparable in profit to Oracle, Alibaba and Tencent.

GM and Micron have ridiculously low PE ratios. That also says nothing about whether their businesses are at risk of dying.

Is there a reason you linked ibm here? Please elaborate for the not so smart.

a "dead" company can last a very, very long time.

By measure of "cool kid technological fore-runner" IBM has been dead since the early 80s.

Or perhaps more hilariously:

http://excite.com/

reminder that google wanted to sell to excite.com for $750,000, excite.com said no.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/

Sure, but please note that it is not "smart" related.

All i wanted to say is that dying is not related to market value.

Die as in bankrupt or not profitable is a big stretch for its use as a metaphor. Im not sure how to put this without sounding patronizing and/or stupid and/or explaining to retards but:

There are more things in life besides money or economical viability.

One could argue that afk it is way more easy to use it metaphorically to stereotype those that have money than those who do not.