
Google Labs Winding Down - snikolic
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows.html
======
ChuckMcM
The scary thing about that announcement are it uses the exact same terminology
Sun Microsystems used. 'All the wood behind one arrow' being the most
relevant. Since I know some of the ex-Sun, current-Google folks I"m guessing
at least a few of them flinched reflexively at that.

That being said, I hope this does _not_ mean they are killing off their
research group. If they did I think it would be a colossally poor move on
Google's part. While Google is famous for it's 20% time initiative its also
infamous for having folks deny it or 'target' it (which is to say you can
spend 20% of your time working on anything you want as long as it helps this
department's goals) which made it difficult to be a source of innovation.

~~~
gsharma
I believe it is not about killing the research, but more of killing the public
aspect of it. They want to be less open about future products/innovations and
be more like Apple.

Edit: To make it clear - Not that anything is wrong with it. It's probably
better for the company.

~~~
coderdude
Looks like some HN users have caught the butt-rage since nothing you said was
false except maybe that Google would want to be like Apple.

Edit: Uh oh, looks like it's spreading to me now. Here's something shiny to
distract you: OS X Lion, iOS5, MacBook Air, App Store is better than Android.

~~~
FrojoS
That might be. Apple now has much more revenue than Google.

Though, just today I was thinking: 'Well, Google with their young nerdy
founders might just not care as much about profit.' I hope Google won't
sacrifice geeky projects like autonomous cars for better quarterly numbers.

~~~
coderdude
Good thing their autonomous cars project isn't part of Labs and could make
them an obscene amount of money if it works out.

~~~
ralfd
I wondered a few days ago about the cars: Wouldn't it make more sense to make
that project open source?

~~~
coderdude
From a good-for-mankind perspective, probably. From Google's perspective I
really don't think so. If they can perfect that technology they will have a
great opportunity to be the only company in the world able to license the
ability to automate the transportation of people and goods using existing
vehicles and roadways. It would be a gold mine.

~~~
ma2rten
Well technically, they could open source and still have patents on it. That
way they can be the only supplier of autonomous car software for car
manufacturers and still allow people to play with the code.

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scottyallen
This doesn't come at all as a surprise to me. Google Labs was well known
internally for being a graveyard for projects that, ironically, was really
hard to launch stuff in. Anything that Google launches anywhere automatically
gets a huge amount of traffic, and, because it has the Google brand on it,
it's expected to meet a fairly high quality, stability, and scalability bar.
In practice, this meant was never really possible to use Labs for throwing
something up quickly to see if it stuck. This, combined with the maintenance
overhead of keeping the various projects running (which were often grafted
onto other larger codebases), makes shutting it down a pretty obvious
decision.

~~~
codingthebeach
Obvious decision or not, Google Labs has been one of my favorite parts of
Google for years. For me at least, this deprecation pushes Google one notch
closer to "boring megacorp" and one notch further away from the sort of cool
"research garden" that Google is famous for being. I'm not saying Labs was the
forefront of Google research, just that it was a fun, lighthearted place where
nifty (and often quite strange) ideas could be trotted out.

~~~
_delirium
For me it's not even so much the research angle, as the power-user-features
angle. Via Google Labs you could enable features and interface customizations
that for various reasons didn't make sense to put into the default product,
especially in Gmail and Google Maps. Some were not at all researchy, just
simple interface enhancements, like the "drop lat/lon marker" feature in
Google Maps. I'll miss that flexibility if they don't replace it with some
kind of advanced-options config.

~~~
tonfa
Google Labs is different from the gmail/maps labs. See the linked blog post
and <http://www.googlelabs.com/>.

~~~
_delirium
Ah cool; it looks like that clarification was added in an update. I had
assumed that those were part of the overall "Google Labs" project, but maybe
that was just a (now-obsolete) branding strategy to tie together all the
"labs" stuff.

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russell
Corporate labs are funny things. Where would the valley be without Xerox PARC
or America without Bell Labs? But from the corporate view they are fairly
inefficient. They are a very academic environment, working at a leisurely
pace, not at all like startups or even the lean-and-mean among established
companies. Self-education and publication is as much a goal as improving the
bottom line. Eventually the suits take notice and start reorganizing things to
bring the fruits of their labor immediately to market. It happened at Bell, at
PARC and at a lab where I was resident. Unfortunately, the shift in focus
doesnt really work. The researchers cant shift their timelines. Partially
baked ideas dont easily become marketable products and the future becomes
sacrificed to the immediate.

If you want short term results, the policy of engineers working on their own
pet projects 20% time is really fruitful, but the promising ones then need
time and resources to become fully realized. I think thats where Google
failed.

Maybe Google is inventing something better than Google Labs. I can see a
successful approach being to sprout mini-labs around promising projects where
the developer(s) get resources like additional developers, designers, market
researchers, QA and the like. This of course sounds a lot like internal
entrepreneurial startups, which havent been notably successful. I can hope
that Google has something more innovative up its sleeve than the bottom line.

~~~
rxin
Google Labs itself is just a repository of experimental projects, not a
research organization. It is not the same idea as PARC, which is a research
organization.

------
macrael
Relatedly, Steve Ballmer a few weeks ago at Microsoft's earnings:

"We increasingly are only working on things that are actually very important.
The day and age of idle, smaller things [at Microsoft] is a little bit behind
us. We're putting more energy behind fewer things than we have
historically."[1]

[1]:[http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-
wininfo/b...](http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-
wininfo/ballmer-discusses-future-microsofts-future-139678)

~~~
yalogin
This is probably a bigger news and also sadder as Microsoft labs does great
research and really hardcore stuff that never sees daylight. Google labs on
the other hand though is more consumer oriented.

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jambo
I hope this isn't bad news for Swiffy, the very cool Flash->HTML5 converter
they launched not long ago. Hopefully they'll commit to licensing the runtime
so that people can continue to use their converted files. If they take it
down, existing Swiffy conversions will stop working, and right now it says
"All Rights Reserved" at the top of the runtime they host.

Anyone know if there are any plans to open source projects like this, or if
there's a way to get in touch with someone who could do so? I've submitted
feedback to their feedback form, but I'm not sure if it will be seen.

<http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/>

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forgotusername
We're deprecating our platform for releasing technically interesting
experiments that don't make us money

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brandonb
Sometimes you hear people say "we're like a startup inside of a big company."
This is a great example of why it's hard to make that work. In a big company,
you have one source of funding, and they can pull the plug at any moment--
sometimes because your project is doing badly, and sometimes just because you
don't fit into the overall corporate strategy this year. At a startup, you
only die if you run out of money (which doesn't happen overnight), and if an
existing investor says no, you can still raise capital on the open market.

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contextfree
I don't know anything about archery, but this strikes me as a weird metaphor -
is the amount of wood that goes into an arrow really what makes it hit the
target?

~~~
sjs
It's not the best metaphor but it is a relatively well known and understood
saying for many native English speakers (at least in North America).

I think some people who have replied to you are trying way too hard to make
the metaphor fit. Top item later today will be about a Hacker Newsian with
feathers, arrowheads, and a sharp edged rock, being arrested by Google's
security while muttering about trajectories and wind resistance and trying to
catch Googlers in the cafeteria.

~~~
esrauch
I've never heard it before today, I'm pretty surprised to hear you say that it
is a common thing in North America.

~~~
sjs
It's not so common that I hear it often or anything. It might not even be as
well known as I think it is.

~~~
queensnake
/I'd/ never heard it before today - one old USian.

------
flocial
I remember a quote from the person who worked on Google+ before heading for
Facebook saying "things got to bureaucratic and political" or something to
that effect. It feels like a downward spiral or at least seems like a common
pattern where an organization loses its agility (not to be confused with
"agile") and starts compensating with cutting down.

Labs had an amazing run but Google surely needs to re-invent itself to handle
the challenges ahead. Honestly, their setup is not that different from
Microsoft where they have cash cows concentrated in several areas whereas
Apple has more flexibility with a wider range of services without being spread
out too much.

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tomkarlo
Given the first-day issues with launching experiments under the Google brand,
would it make sense for them to sometimes 'stealth launch' projects without an
explicit Google branding? Experimentation is important for innovation.

~~~
watmough
Yes, and maybe with the side-effect of getting a truer read on reaction versus
the reaction to experiments under a google banner.

Nonetheless it may make google a less fun place to be if they do drop a bunch
of people, and they surely will lose some of their tech buzz cred.

~~~
tomkarlo
I don't think there's been any implication that they're cutting people related
to this change... I read it as the reverse - they're trying to focus the
headcount they have on projects they consider more core to their business,
which is probably more effective than adding headcount and keeping labs.

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ck2
I thought the new google was going to have more engineers in charge.

This does not feel like engineers in charge.

It feels like public relations people in charge.

------
redthrowaway
I liked the customization that Labs offers (undo send in gmail being a
brilliant example), but I can see where they're coming from on the focus
front. So long as I get to keep the features I currently have enabled, I'm
happy.

~~~
FaceKicker
I believe this only applies to the "main" Google Labs
(<http://www.googlelabs.com/>), not to things called "Labs" that are
integrated in products like Gmail.

------
jameswilsterman
This had to happen:

<http://morewoodbehindfewerarrows.tumblr.com/>

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natasham25
This is a big mistake for Google. One of the big allures of working for Google
as an engineer is doing something that gets millions of views. Google Labs is
one of the most exciting aspects of this idea, since it lets engineers
showcase anything they create to millions of consumers. Now only products that
are already in line with the Google products will have the same amount of
publicity. This is a very sad day for Google engineers. I will not be
surprised to see Google loose even more talented geniuses because of this.
Goodbye innovation, hello corporation.

------
zipdog
Given the issue of launching projects under the weight of the Google brand, I
don't see why Google doesn't borrow the idea of Hollywood studios to just have
a 'separate studio' brand for things that aren't ready for the big time, while
still letting them go live to users

(I realize this is about focusing energy on Google Plus, I'm just concerned
they won't bring Labs back)

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sharjeel
This isn't April Fool joke, is it?

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acak
Google's '20 percent time' will still allow employees to keep experimenting.

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/20/20-percent/>

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bauchidgw
goodbye pagespeed / pagespeedonline / mod_pagespeed ...

~~~
ceejayoz
Uh, no. It's open source, so even if Google took it down you could put it on
Github and keep maintaining it. It'll likely just move to Google Code.

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usaar333
How does this affect existing labs products? For instance I use apps like
Google goggles, Google listen, My Tracks, and Shopper

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sytelus
More dead wood behind fewer sharp ideas.

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Shenglong
Does this mean I might lose my Multiple Inbox on GMail? ... I hope at least
that one sticks.

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shapeshed
so the strategy is we'll just buy innovation or we don't care about
innovation?

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rachelbythebay
Fewer arrows? Is that how you say "fewer sharp people"?

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traldan
Does this include Gmail labs? If so, fuck.

~~~
andybak
Apparently not.

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shacker
it really was just a matter of time.

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invisiblefunnel
Google labs lab winding down

