[wohfab]

Oh man, this comments...

The number of products, Google actually "killed" and not just rename, merge into another product, or develop further under a new name, is quite low. And frankly, most people, complaining about product lifetime, probably never even used any of those products at all.

Yes, killedbygoogle.com is fun, but come on...

[munk-a]

Hey - I'm still personally sore over iGoogle. They killed off an absolutely trivial to use RSS reader - I made heavy use of iGoogle while it still existed... and they killed it off to try and save Google+ which they then proceeded to also abandon.

I've definitely felt the burn of Google just randomly killing off a useful thing for some opaque marketing decision that turned out to be extremely ill-advised.

[MikeDelta]

I'm not worried about them killing the service, I am worried about them blocking the domains of my business, for some vague reason, and me having no ability to talk to anyone to have it solved.

I am sure it doesn't happen often, but if it does it sure is not going to be to me.

[wohfab]

But that can happen with every domain registrar, can't it?

[rurp]

So you're saying all I have to worry about is my account being nuked by an opaque algorithm or the price suddenly being jacked up 20x, like say the Maps API?! Great, sign me up!

[rendall]

> The number of products, Google actually "killed"... is quite low.

That is an extraordinary claim, but I'm listening.

https://killedbygoogle.com has 264 listings. Are you saying that if we excluded those that were actually renamed or folded into other products, that it would reduce 264 products to some number that is "quite low"?

[wohfab]

Of the stuff, more than a very specific niche group of people can use and then actually used? Yes.

[rendall]

The killed products that I personally actually used were:

  YouTube Originals
  Google Chrome Apps
  G Suite (Legacy Free Edition)
  Material Gallery
  Google Sites (Classic)
  Google My Maps
  Google Play Music (replaced by YouTube Music, which is a degraded experience I pay for but do not use as much)
  Google+
  Google URL Shortener
  Google Goggles
  Google Nexus
  Picasa
  Google Reader

I personally think 13 is a lot, but understand that's a matter of opinion. The quantity is less important than the quality, though. I relied on Google Reader, G Suite, Google My Maps, Google Play Music and Picasa. I know of businesses built on Google Chrome Apps, and purchased services from one of them.

Those particularly personally inconvenient ones made me understand that I was too reliant on Google products, any one of which could be yanked at any time for any reason or no reason: Gmail, Voice, Google Drive, Google Cloud Platform, YouTube, and now Google Domains.

I don't have insight into why some products get yanked and others do not, and came over time to understand that my internal model about it does not correspond to actual Google reality. For instance, I might think that Gmail is way too valuable a property for Google to ever kill, but I would have thought that about many of those others, too.

[wohfab]

Sure, if a specific feature of Classic Google Sites was used and is now different or was not merged to the New Google Sites, it's a matter of opinion.

But that's what I mean. I cannot account for all of the services you mentioned, but there is still Google Sites, there is still Google Workspace as the G Suite successor, many of the My Maps features were just moved to Google Maps. The hardware line of phones is now Pixel instead of Nexus. Obviously it evolved from Nexus and there is stuff from Nexus that didn't make it to Pixel. But if this is what we're talking about, every single tech company on the planet is "killing" stuff every time they release a new version of soft- or hardware.

Those are just examples off the top of my head. There are things that Google "killed" & I loved Google+, I used the URL shortener regularly, and the end of Google Reader was a tragedy (probably the one Google product I personally miss), but this huge list isn't a very fair depiction, IMHO.

[rendall]

That goalpost can be fairly moved. Fair point.

[sigmonsays]

but it's true...