
Google Announces Plans To Shutter Knol, Friend Connect, And More - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/google-announces-plans-to-shutter-knol-friend-connect-and-more/
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thetrumanshow
Kinda wish they would keep FriendConnect. It is a nice container to run
Javascript apps on 3rd party sites (it proxies your requests so you can call
your home server and serve up data). Also, the polling and newsletter apps
that are baked into the FriendConnect toolset was sure nice.

Also it kinda sucks that I trusted them to handle the sign-in for my
community. 12K users. {Sigh}

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hardtke
I see they are shutting down their clean energy program. The renewable energy
cheaper than coal initiative showed a unique level of arrogance. We, a
software company, can solve a problem in which we have no experience better
than people who have devoted their lives to the subject.

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moultano
> We, a software company, can solve a problem in which we have no experience
> better than people who have devoted their lives to the subject.

The false assumption here is that Google is only a software company. Any
company with lots of machines is at least in part a power management /
hardware company, and in the field of datacenters, Google is likely the best
in the world. They put a lot of engineering into getting heat from point A to
point B.

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hardtke
If they were working on data center efficiency, that would be one thing. The
RE<C program was an attempt to make solar power more efficient. This involves
basic physics, material science, and manufacturing. Nothing that Google had
done to that point would qualify them to work in that area.

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ajross
Nothing Google had done in 1999 would qualify them to dominate internet search
or scalability either. This is a fallacy. Asserting that the only people who
can productively solve a problem are those who have dedicated their careers to
it is just plain wrong. It flies in the face of almost every success story,
ever.

That said, clearly they didn't solve this problem. If they were making serious
progress, they wouldn't have killed it.

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petervandijck
Thank god they're getting rid of Knol.

