
Killed by Google - jaytaylor
https://killedbygoogle.com/index.html
======
ColinWright
Is this related to "The Google Cemetery" ??

Submitted here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509735)

HUGE discussion there ...

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jaytaylor
Yes, I found this link there. Killed by Google is more comprehensive and
detailed compared to the cemetery site.

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gkoberger
It sucks when Google kills a product I love (okay, pretty much just Google
Reader), but I also like that it means Google can take risks on new products.
If they didn't have a mentality of trying lots of new things, we likely
wouldn't have GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs, Android, etc... not to mention
new things like WayMo or Calico.

On top of that, most "dead" products aren't gone completely... there's a
strong Google alternative that they're investing in.

~~~
timClicks
The most obvious case of this is Writely, listed right down the bottom. Yes,
the brand is well dead, but Google Docs is still very strong.

~~~
on_and_off
Also Fabric. Sure they are killing the brand but they have been busy merging
Crashlytics and Firebase crashes into one product for a very long time.

Fabric even has a nice roadmap page where they explain where this is going.

Also both products have different advantages :

\- Fabric is way more mature

\- The base approach of Firebase is 100% better than what Fabric does : it
runs on a separate process so it can catch crashes that are totally silent for
Fabric, like crash at startup or native layer crash.

So while I would not have liked to still have 2 competitors, it is good to see
these merged.

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SmirkingRevenge
I'm really tired of this topic, and no one has said anything remotely new or
insightful on it for quite some time. Can we.. Maybe move on?

Google discontinues products if they don't meet whatever their internal
criteria is for success. Some people don't like it. Some people don't care.

That's about all there is to say.

~~~
zwily
I suspect we’ll move on from this topic about the same time we move on from
believing every new iPhone release is the beginning of the end for Apple.

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pscsbs
This is why Google struggles to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in the
enterprise cloud space - the trust that these services will be maintained and
legacy support provided just isn't there for large enterprise clients.

~~~
xtracto
Yes! that is why I would never trust my cloud infrastructure to GCS... who
knows if they will discontinue their S3 copy in two years.

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dymk
Half of these are either hardware products which reached EOL (just like every
other manufacture, maybe besides Apple), or rebranding/merging of one product
into another, or just being split out into a separate Alphabet company.

Not particularly compelling.

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tannhaeuser
Google hasn't just killed products, they destroyed whole community channels
with their actions, eg. RSS and nntp archives.

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trevyn
Usenet archives are still there, if you search from
[https://groups.google.com/forum](https://groups.google.com/forum)

~~~
teh_klev
I've searched for some of my old posts from the early 90's onwards (mostly in
non-controversial political discussions and comp.*), they're not there. It
seems to be a selective archive. It's verging on impossible to find anything
meaningful.

~~~
xtracto
One thought that I have had is, would NNTP nowadays be a good place for
discussion? There are still news servers (mainly used for piracy last I
remember), but maybe September has actually ended in Usenet given that all the
12 year olds have moved on to facebook.

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SiVal
Even when they don't kill the service, they can increase its price so
dramatically overnight that it may as well have been killed, as many who built
a business on Google Maps discovered. When Google makes almost all of its
money on advertising, everything else is of so little concern to them that
they can kill a service or arbitrarily make a change that they expect will
literally drive away 90% of its customers, and it won't matter.

Apple is that way about 3rd-party developers, too. When they make almost all
of the software in-house that they hope you will use, they can make platform
changes that will break others' apps and shrug it off. Their software will be
prepared for the changes, and if you can't afford to keep rebuilding your
product given the tiny price you have to sell it for, Apple won't notice that
you're gone. Apple could probably set up a special program for about a dozen
major software providers (Adobe, Google, Facebook,...), tell the rest to build
web apps (as Jobs originally planned), and Apple would "bravely" get past the
howls of complaint and move on mostly unscathed.

The majority of us _really_ need to be as biased as we reasonably can be
toward open systems, standards, and platforms that can't be shut down by a
single, large player that has no need for our business.

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sbilstein
I’m at least glad that there aren’t teams full of disgruntled Googlers
maintaining zombie products. That is the worst for job satisfaction.

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cafebabbe
Google reader. never forget.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I never used it, what were killer the features that makes it so dearly missed?
I would guess solid parsing, being fast and accessible from anywhere, but
surely there's more?

~~~
teh_klev
It was a fantastic RSS aggregator. Had a superb compact UI you could read on a
tiny phone screen in bed. It was fast and (yeah ok, free). It had everything
you needed to keep on top of all your feeds.

Everything else pales in comparison (sure I know there's
[https://bazqux.com/](https://bazqux.com/) and the like, but Google Reader
just worked).

~~~
teh_klev
Apropos my previous comment. I'm 51 and lived through the inception of RSS
(Dave Winer, RSS, Atom etc). It was a normal thing before Facebook and Google+
came along and shat on the parade.

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codyogden
Thanks for sharing Killed by Google. I started it after the Inbox by Google
announcement. My goal was to create a statement of criticism against churn of
consumer products by Google. I think there is also a statement about closed
systems that are controlled by a single player/entity, and I wanted to do it
in a tongue-in-cheek form.

I’m also a developer, and I understand the product lifecycle. There are still
some things wrong with the list that have been pointed out, but this is an
open source project. I’m going to be editing and pruning over this weekend.

I hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving, and everyone outside the US is
heading into a restful weekend.

Edit: Looks like we got removed from the top listings. If you'd like to
contribute or make a suggestion, feel free to create an issue in the Github
repo. Thank you all!

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emmelaich
Most are replaced or included in some other G product.

So they do live on.

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yellow_lead
I could see someone creating a service like this for looking up discontinued
products of many companies. Could be great for market research.

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darren_
Definitely the best looking and most comprehensive of the three sites on this
theme I've seen.

Using the term 'kill' is unnecessarily negative, IMO, especially when the site
author seems to consider 'rebranding' something as 'killing' it.

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vlindos
Will be interesting to see how many businesses are killed by each of these
products.

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ronilan
Excellent typography. Wish all sites were as readable.

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mehrdadn
This seems pretty misleading... I wouldn't classify Google X as "killed" when
it was transformed into an Alphabet company.

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gonyea
Some items on this list are rather silly.

Does anybody consider the iPhone 7 as being “Killed by Apple” or was it just
superseded by newer hardware?

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hawski
I don't understand what they mean by killed. For example Chromebook Pixel 2
(2015) will receive updates till mid-2020.

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romed
A lot of these are pretty silly. 100% of Songza features were rolled into
Google Music. Listing every phone they no longer market doesn’t make a lot of
sense either. You might as well list Maps for Series 60 phones if you wanted
to get down to that level.

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darren_
(googler on maps here) the maps backend team makes an explicit effort to keep
old things going, I wouldn't be surprised if old gmaps on some really ancient
phones still worked.

Last I checked the pre-2012 Apple Maps (the one that used google tiles, iOS5
and below) still works.

~~~
romed
Yeah, it is amazing. Maps only recently stopped working on my ancient
BlackBerry.

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murderfs
Listing every single hardware product seems a bit dubious...

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IBM
Someone on Something Awful made one too but this one looks a lot better (and
is up-to-date).

[https://didgoogleshutdown.com/](https://didgoogleshutdown.com/)

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NicoJuicy
Some remarks required,

eg. Pixel and Pixel XL, the products were 2 years old. There is a Google Pixel
3 XL launched in October 2018. The Pixel line isn't dead. It's logical that
harware gets updated and/or name changed. They changed the Nexus line as
budget model to Pixel flagship model to less hurt their partners (didn't like
it also though).

Google Nexus 4 / Samsung Nexus, migrated to Pixel.

Google Inbox, the product is killed, but the features are said to be partially
migrated to Gmail.

Google Video Player, migrated to webm.

Project Tango to ArCode ( is mentioned there)

Google Goggles, migrated to Google Lens app.

None the less, a lot are dead and buried though. I used goo.gl a lot, but
there are other services.

For RSS, i use my own RSS application:
[http://handlr.sapico.me/](http://handlr.sapico.me/)

~~~
O1111OOO
> The Pixel line isn't dead. It's logical that harware gets updated

Agree and was similarly put off by a few entries: some of the items listed are
evolutions of a product line. Reader was the biggest deal for me but...
interestingly, it helped me deGoogle-fy.

I'd be curious to see a similar set for Microsoft products. Off the top of my
head, they had Zune, MSN network, Mobile (pocket pc) and the recent attempt,
Microsoft Money, Windows RT, some Office Products for Apple (which, if I
recall, really hurt the OS at the time)...

They also had a number of products, that on the _surface_ , appeared to be a
continuation of a line but seemed (to me) a way to force users into new data
formats (and reinvigorate sales).

