Google is a developing company right? Wrong! This is what they've killed off this year:
Google Gears died in March at HTML 5 became the tool of choice.
Google Health
Google Powermeter
Google Labs. In Google labs we've lost:
Google Talk Guru
Art Project
Google Body (Although this has been taken over by ZygoteBody)
Tashkeel (A tool to add missing diacritics to Arabic text)
Open Spot (parking application)
Script converter (converting text and web pages from one script to another)
City Tours (Suggested multi-day walking tours of major cities given a starting address.)
FastFlip (Blindingly fast overviews of headline pages of top newspapers.)
FollowFinder (Google Follow Finder analyzed public social graph information (following and follower lists) on Twitter to find people you might want to follow.)
Realtime Mytracks (Experience the Tour de France like never before.)
Google Squared (Fun matrix creator)
People Hopper (Want to see how distant your friend is from you or your other friends visually? )
Google Sets (Nice tool to help you think through a query and appropriate terms. Google wants to think for you.)
Related Links (a tool to help webmasters increase page views)
InQuotes (a really useful tool to see what politicians were saying about a wide variety of subjects)
Google Image Swirl (interesting image visualisation tool)
We also have lost
Google Toolbar for Firefox (Very useful, but then that helped keep people with Firefox, and Google wants us to use Chrome, so if it's a choice between Google and cash, or assistance to users, we know what's going to win out, eh?)
Diacritize
Sidewiki
Wave (remember how that was going to be the really big next thing and change the way that we used the web?)
Google Friends newsletter (And of course they killed the Google Librarian Center a long time before and promised us a newsletter instead - what came of that?)
Google Directory (which still exists prior and post in the form of Dmoz )
Aardvark (Which I'm bitterly disappointed about, because it was an excellent product and worthy of continuance, but hey, if it wasn't churning out cash for the big G, it's gotta go, right?)
Google Slide which they bought for $228,000,000 the previous August. Just imagine being able to throw away that kind of money!
The Google Pack (a collection of handy to install resources and applications)
Google Notebook
Subscribed Links
Google Maps API for Flash
Google Web Security
Buzz (another game changer)
Eliminated iGoogle's social features
Google Code Search
Wonder Wheel
Timeline search
Google Newspaper Archive (still there, but not being continued or worked on)
The + search function (which has supposedly been flipped to work with Google+ but I still see no evidence of it)
They've also removed direct links to Pagelinks and Related Pages on the Advanced Search option, and they've pretty much hidden that as well.
Depending on how you count it, we're looking at close on 50 different projects, resources or functions. This doesn't look to me like a company that's healthy, with a clear idea of where it is going and what it is doing. Quite the contrary - they woke up very late to the idea of social media and are desperately playing catchup now. And we're supposed to believe the lie that 'it's all on Google' and 'we don't need libraries because we have Google'. Really?
The bottom line is that if Google doesn't see a very fast financial return on something, it's history. Never mind businesses that might use something, or the users themselves, it doesn't matter to Google. This is NOT a nice company as they would have you believe. It lives in a very harsh world, and it's prepared to do whatever it takes to win. I get that, really I do, and good luck to them, but please remember: Do NOT trust Google, it is not your friend.
Edits to add:
Google Newstimeline, Google UncleSam (from @awareci)
Google Knol (1 May 2012) Starred results, Property search (from Karen Blakeman)
The point was also made in Twitter: junesix "It's a sign of a healthy company with focus. Rather than spread across 50 small tools, build core products in social, mobile" And it's a point worth considering. I don't see trying a whole bunch of different things in a shotgun approach as healthy with focus. It's more akin to throwing plaster against a wall and seeing what sticks and what doesn't. I do however agree that Google is now trying to build all their products around the G+ resource, but that turns them from a company that was doing a lot of different things into a company that's trying to fit everything into one shoe - and chopping off anything that doesn't fit. Since Google has a very poor record on social media, that's a very large risk to take.
Playing devil's advocate, but you could argue that Google is a healthy company, in that it has the capacity to experiment and the performance analysis, confidence & flexibility to ditch failing projects quickly.
Posted by: Ed Jewell | December 10, 2011 at 02:33 PM
How could you omit ending Google Reader social?
Posted by: john gordon | December 10, 2011 at 09:20 PM
As an ex-Firefox contributor who works on Chrome, I have the perspective to say that ending Toolbar for Firefox made sense from a "these features are almost all built into Firefox now so the product no longer is compelling for users" perspective. Which is in fact precisely why Google said they were killing it.
Posted by: Peter Kasting | December 12, 2011 at 08:29 PM
Well, I kind of trust Google.
Posted by: Vaaano | December 14, 2011 at 10:26 AM
Why would you trust Google?
Posted by: Phil Bradley | December 14, 2011 at 10:43 AM
why wouldn't you trust google?
Posted by: Beej | December 16, 2011 at 09:58 PM
That you'd even ask the question is, with respect, jaw dropping. I suggest that you go off and read some of my previous posts about the company, and while you're at it, check out those of my colleague Karen Blakeman who has written extensively about how dangerous Google is.
Posted by: Phil Bradley | December 16, 2011 at 10:33 PM