[Navarr]

I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects.

Google checkout turned into Google Wallet. Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul.

There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them.

Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the idea doesn't work they pivot and drop it.

[methehack]

It is a little unfair, I agree. And I think it's all too easy to be snarky about other peoples hard work (haters gotta hate), especially when it doesn't work out.

At the same time, Google seems to want it both ways. They have an idea and use their size to attract users and, perhaps even unintentionally, effectively block others from implementing the idea or scare others away (a size thing). Then, if they decide they don't like it, which can feel arbitrary, they pull out. Now the idea is tainted so others are less likely to implement it and users are left wondering what to do. They really seem like a bull in a china shop sometimes.

I like the innovation and the experimentation, but it seems like they could be more graceful about it for both users and other entities trying the same things. Perhaps they should try these experiments in a more stealth way? Pretend not to be Google? Of course, people might super-hate on them for that, huh?

[throwawaymsft]

Totally agree on wanting it both ways. When you associate a product with a brand, you are attempting to overcome objections by saying "This brand supports this product and is putting its reputation behind it."

If Google wants to experiment, create projects that don't have the Google brand (they just use G+ login like any other startup) and then reveal it was Google all along.

Let the projects succeed on their own merits, with their own marketing. If you tie in the Google brand you are setting expectations that this will be a long-lasting effort.

[Navarr]

> If you tie in the Google brand you are setting expectations that this will be a long-lasting effort.

I don't think anyone has that expectation anymore :p

[fineIllregister]

For some projects, they could release the code as open source, like they did for Wave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave#Open_source

[und3rw4t3rp00ps]

To me, this is evidence of Google's rather awkward relationship with consumers (i.e. they toss tons of branded endeavors at us, see what sticks), and not a knock against fearlessly trying things or whatever. The best brands are coy and careful with their identity... google sorta slops it around. this is a list of failed consumer facing products more than it is a list of "bad ideas".

[SixSigma]

By comparison, food processing companies introduce 9 new food products every day [1]. 70% fail within a year. [2]

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets-prices/processin...

[2] http://smallbusiness.chron.com/failure-rate-new-items-launch...

[eplanit]

I don't really see how it is awkward or hurts relationships with consumers (especially when most all products and services are free) -- it's a form of market research and product testing. Who needs focus groups when you have the world?

[und3rw4t3rp00ps]

I think focus groups are inherently embarrassing. Not commenting on their utility, but the act of showcasing something to "normal people" for their "feedback" is, at its essence, pathetic.

While Google's 'everything in beta' mentality is endearing in a 'democracy'/'transparent fun-loving engineers' sort of way... it is also evidence to the fact that our information behemoth is rudderless.

Google Buzz.

[vertex-four]

Because consumers learn not to trust products with Google branding to stick around.

[wahsd]

You mean their whole mentality of "we built this half baked product, why the hell isn't anyone coming?"

[wozniacki]

Google Desktop Search - even from a cursory glance at the comments in this thread and the absence of its mention - is by far the most under-appreciated Google product ever.

That sucker was good. Great even.

It would find things across browsers, through documents and files and even collate results from web searches that most browsers - sometimes even Chrome to this day - missed or never registered in the history, in the first place.

I would have gladly paid some $50-$75 a year to have it work across all of my devices.

And I don't typically pay for most offerings. It was that good.

I miss that one badly.

[frik]

Google desktop search was great. At the high of the desktop search engine race, it competed with OSX Spotlight and Windows desktop search (and various others like Yahoo X11, Copernic desktop search). Google worked on 3 major OS and run on a local web server. It looked like a local Google search and indexed various file formats incl. iFilter support.

As basically all companies stopped further developing desktop search products, I needed a proper replacement. I developed an enterprise/desktop search engine last year that basically reimplements Google desktop search including advanced search syntax and support for various file formats.

[smacktoward]

I developed an enterprise/desktop search engine last year that basically reimplements Google desktop search including advanced search syntax and support for various file formats.

If this were Reddit, this is the point where I would post the "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY" image.

[smacktoward]

Yeah, me too. It seems like desktop search as a product sector just kind of fell out of favor one day -- one moment there were a bunch of products scrapping it out, the next they were all gone. I have no idea why, I found it desktop search incredibly useful and would also happily have paid for a good product. But no really good ones exist anymore.

The even more mind-boggling thing is that for Google especially, desktop search would seem to be a huge opportunity. Imagine how precisely you could target ads to users if they let you scan their entire hard drive! Jeez louise.

[gk1]

To add one more: Writely became Google Docs -- anything but a failure.

[JoeAltmaier]

Hm yet its leaky, buggy and low-feature. Useful for casual use but nowhere near professional. When will they drop it, or break it? Like some gmail features got broken this week.

Lesson: don't hang anything important on Google apps.

[livingparadox]

Google docs is fantastic. I use it exclusively (docs and sheets) and haven't seen anything buggy about it. I have never found myself a wanting a feature in google docs that wasn't also missing from Office. The only limitation I came across in sheets was the limited scope of conditional formatting. That's pretty much it.

[nightpool]

FWIW there are a few features I would love to have in docs: different headers/footers for title pages pops out to me. Sheets is a LOT less featured then excel but the scripting is pretty excellent so that actually makes it a better product for most of what I want to do. Plus who really uses the advanced features of excel?

[JoeAltmaier]

Ive just been using it a week or so, but this is what I remember right off.

Features missing from Word Docs: KeepTogether, orphan/widow management, page layout, reviewing(?)

Bugs:

typeface changes when going back to Normal after any heading (doesn't change but ribbon says it has).

Ctrl-C copies but Ctrl-X doesn't delete text

Font changes randomly DO or DONT apply to the line you're on, when not selected

[holdenc]

Yes, Google Checkout became Google Wallet, which shut down their API for digital goods three days ago: https://developers.google.com/wallet/digital/

[21echoes]

their API for digital goods is now called Android Pay, and goes live within months ( http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/02/android-pay-is-real-and-wil... & http://www.androidcentral.com/google-launching-their-own-pay... )

[tdkl]

.. and what will it be called after that ?

Google seems to hit their head through the wall that the issue in user adoption are the APIs. Nope, it's politics.

[jmilloy]

As you suggest, just because some idea was dropped doesn't mean that Google did the wrong thing. But, it also doesn't mean that they didn't abandon the idea, so it ends up here in a list. I don't see any general Google bashing yet.

Similarly, I'd put a phonograph in a museum, even though it's features have been replaced by other things.

[kedean]

I'm not a google apologist, but the list definitely has a few undeserved products. The most obvious is Writely, which was simply rebranded to Google Docs, then further rebranded to Google Drive. The writely.com domain even redirects to Drive.

[logicallee]

I agree. Consumers can't lambast companies for not being innovative or daring enough, if they turn around and rip them a new one if they release anything other than something they're fully behind for 20 years, and either keep everything other than that to themselves or kill it before it gets to that stage.

You can't have it both ways, people.

[dingaling]

> You can't have it both ways, people.

Of course we can. It's just that companies are now so geared to quarterly roadmaps that nothing has time to gain momentum unless it becomes a phenomenon.

I see this with airlines as well; they launch a route in the middle of winter, or on a business route with schedules that are awkward for meetings, and then can it two months later because 'no-one uses it'. Which dissuades other airlines from trying a more sensible approach.

[logicallee]

No, we really can't have it both ways. Obviously (clearly) they will keep products that have sufficient momentum.

With a little thought, however, it will be obvious to you that the consumer's definition of "sufficient" cannot possibly match a company's definition in 100% of cases: there will be a grey area where at least some people will like mouthwash-flavored bubble gum, but not enough people do that the company can afford to keep it. (And see if it does take off later, as you say would have happened in many cases.)

Consumers have two alternatives: either allow companies to test products like this without backlash, and accept that some products will be discontinued due to lack of adoption, or to have stagnancy with only upstart companies trying new things and the existing brands sitting on the bylines looking for success built elsewhere that they can copy.

I support innovation and encourage companies to go out on a limb, without any backlash if they discontinue these tests. (Even if I loved the product.)

[Dylan16807]

Why can't we have it both ways?

You have this unstated assumption that they have to quickly abandon products that don't gain traction. But that's not true. It's short-term thinking over long-term.

When a company spends 30 man years developing a product, they can set aside 1 or 2 extra for long term maintenance. By promising or consistently providing this, they can build customer trust and get more users.

Keeping digital services up is cheap. It's shameful whenever DRM or video game servers go down after just a couple years because the company ran out of money or doesn't care anymore. These things could have been funded upfront with the tiniest fraction of the budget.

[stathisg]

To add one more in the list, Google Talk eventually became Hangouts. The list states that it was abandoned in 2013, but it was actually still working properly at the end of 2014 when I last used it. I don't know if it works any more, since I eventually switched to hangouts (although I was reluctant to do so - https://twitter.com/StathisG/status/530740696719060992).

[yasth]

Talk was replaced by Hangouts, not became. There are important differences because talk was based on open models, and Hangouts... was not.

[notatoad]

no, talk literally became hangouts. For the android and chrome apps at least, the change was pushed as an update to the existing talk app. There's differences between what it is now and what it was before, but it was an update.

[Dylan16807]

Odd, I have a memory of my phone telling me that hangouts was a replacement for talk..

Not that it matters. Pushing a change "as an update" is a detail of how the app database works. It has no bearing on whether it's a replacement or not.

Wikipedia sure seems to think they're different things, and they love to merge articles.

Also if it's not a replacement they sure could have chosen better wording for: "Google Talk app for Windows will stop working on Feb 16 2015. It is replaced by the new Hangouts Chrome app."

[theandrewbailey]

It was working up until last week or so. I got an email saying that "it looks like you're trying to use talk. we've discontinued it."

[thrownaway2424]

The location stuff in G+ is a pale shadow of what Latitude could do.

[maratd]

> If the idea doesn't work they pivot and drop it.

Which is nice for Google, but screws over the users. If you're a user, you should be well aware that Google's products are unreliable and are there as an experiment.

[rdtsc]

> I really don't like things like this.

Really? Can you explain more why. Is there an article accompanying it that shames Google or says anything bad about it. To me it just looks like a company that iterates and is trying new things.

> A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects.

Well it would be bad if they completely threw away the code, and then hired a whole new group of people to work on a similar project. That would make them look worse.

[res0nat0r]

Nah, the whole reason it exists, and is linked here is to try and pile on that Google is terrible and shuts down products that everyone in the world loves. But the reality is the minor minor subset of the world that is HN loved some of these projects and were upset no one else used them, thus they were shut down.

I haven't seen any accompanying MS articles like this, mainly because there haven't been angry posts here of MS shutting down products we think they should keep running forever that no one uses.

[Aldo_MX]

> I haven't seen any accompanying MS articles like this, mainly because there haven't been angry posts here of MS shutting down products

Quite the contrary, people seem to be happy when MS shuts down a product.

http://ie6countdown.com

[pjc50]

Have you not seen how much outrage appears whenever Microsoft change the Windows desktop?

Microsoft also gets the reverse treatment: criticism for "excessive" backwards compatibility^ and leaving old products in use that people want to kill (IE6).

^ Except when they were sabotaging Lotus, Quarterdeck, OS/2, and Samba back in the 90s.

[Navarr]

I volunteer time for a project called The Shotbow Network - it's a Minecraft game network. We've got lots of projects, and there are features etc that we hype up and then either cancel or don't release.

Inevitably, though, everything that went into building either those mini-games or that feature for another game ends up in all of our future projects.

This sort of thing makes it look like those projects are completely dead, despite the fact that they live on either in full or in part under rebranded names or driving Google's next big feature.

[alextingle]

Google Code was awesome, and there's no real replacement for it. koders.com* doesn't even come close.

* - now code.openhub.net

[skj]

github isn't a replacement?

[laumars]

Yes, if the code is on Github. However not everyone who publishes code uses Github (myself included)

[bduerst]

Why not? (I'm genuinely interested here - not trying to snark)

[ilovesatan]

Because not everyone here is the teenage girl version of a programmer who only goes after the newest fad without taking in account the actual features of a system and practical implications of promoting a monopoly.

[laumars]

I can set up my own git repositories so I have no need for github.

[sotiris-k]

not everyone used Google Code either. What's your point?

[tedunangst]

Code Search searched a lot more than just what was stored on Google. What's your point?

[aniket_ray]

I think his point was that Code and Code Search are/were different products.