There's an update on the official Google Blog to tell everyone that they're closing the Google Health product. If you didn't know that they were doing this it's not a big surprise, certainly if you're not based in the US as it was country limited. If you are in the US and you didn't know that it existed, this is one of the reasons why it's closing. It didn't get enough 'broad impact' as they wanted it to. Which actually means that it wasn't bringing in the dollars in the way that they hoped it would. Don't forget folks, Google isn't a search company, it's an advertising company. If a product doesn't make them money in some way, it gets canned.
The second reason is pretty much that even now, or especially now, people do not trust the cloud with their really personal data. There have been enough scares recently to firmly cement this in people's minds - these things, however good they are, can get hacked. People are very precious about their medical details - understandably - and while having them available online isn't a problem for many of them (and Microsoft have a similar product called HealthVault), trusting that stuff to Google is a step too far for many people.
I'm honestly not surprised about this. My initial reaction when I heard that Google was starting this project a few years ago was that even if it was available in the UK, I wouldn't use it. If something is really sensitive, don't put it in the cloud, on the web, on a computer or on a piece of paper. Draw the line as appropriate. This is simply the latest in a very long line of products that Google has canned, and they're quite cold blooded about it - no matter how many people are using something, how valuable it may seem, or how much work people put into a project, the bottom line is that if it doesn't make money quickly, it's outta there.
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