[Balgair]

Don't Forget Wave !

... I really liked Wave...

On Apple's culture: Ship has sailed. Tim doesn't have the gravitas to ensure a new 'Wow!' product is going to ship. He's a damn good manager, but not a superb innovator. Unfortunately, Apple is at it's heart, a 'Wow!' company. I suppose Apple has 'topped off' now and is a mature business state. This is a good thing though! More room for innovations!

[wlesieutre]

And GOOG-411 (didn't have a smartphone yet when they killed this, it was still useful), Google Labs (public access to experimental features in Gmail and other services), Buzz (jk nobody misses that), Reader, Code Search, Q&A, iGoogle portals, and plenty of others.

[vram22]

Didn't know that Google Labs was shut down. Some of the Gmail Labs were useful - and some have probably gone mainstream by now. The one that reminds you if you use a word like "attached" in your email, but have no attachment, comes to mind. I tried at least half a dozen of them, may have only kept using one or two. Still, the Labs idea was good.

[mcintyre1994]

Undo send originated there as well.

[throwaway1892]

I've been using it for years, so I did not realised they had closed Labs in the interim.

[vram22]

Right, good point. That has saved me a few times from accidentally sending an incomplete email - luckily not anything worse :)

[chx]

Google Questions. I know it's been long ago and there were problems but when you needed it for real it worked wonders.

[WWLink]

"Wow!" products usually don't happen overnight though. Take the iPhone for example! Apple was playing around with ideas for tablets, handhelds, PDAs, and other stuff for decades before they launched that. A lot of "what if" prototypes were made and dead end projects ensued.

Google kinda had the right idea with 20% time, I think. In order to make truly ground breaking ideas, you have to have a little bit of margin for playing with ideas. If you make your entire business about trimming fat, making synergies, and maximizing the efficiency - squeezing it out of everyone involved, you're no longer an innovator, you're just an assembly line.