

More spring cleaning out of season at Google - fanfantm
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html

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ecaron
When I read the headline but before I read the article, I had the gut "Great,
what thing is Google killing now that I'm going to miss" reaction.

After reading the article, I can safely say they're making the right decision
killing off all these services (Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Friend Connect,
Google Gears, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave, Knol and Renewable Energy
Cheaper than Coal) as part of their effort to streamline Google. I'm guessing
we're nearing the point where we'll start seeing some random projects coming
out again, but until then the more people they're putting towards spdy and
WebP the more I'm returning to being a Google fan-boy!

~~~
luriel
I only wish they could put a few more people working on Go, but not too many,
wouldn't want to dilute the amazing talent of the current team :)

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boredguy8
I hope that, after the pruning process, some more 'random, rhizomatic' growth
is allowed. You can't always tell what's going to be valuable ahead of time.
And sometimes interesting connections happen when smart people are allowed to
work on important projects.

~~~
j_baker
Google is very much a random, rhizomatic company. For the project I'm working
on, we have all sorts of different groups who are working on random bits of
functionality (some of which overlap with and duplicate each other) that we
need to integrate into one big whole. If anything, I think Google runs the
risk of not having enough organization and unity.

~~~
msellout
Every large organization has departments that overlap and duplicate. The
problem is when there is a gap that no one is working on.

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tikhonj
I'm probably in the minority, but I'm sad to see Google Wave finally die (at
Google, anyhow). Still, I imagine this streamlining is ultimately good for the
company and will result in higher quality for Google's remaining products.

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wizard_2
One of the coolest things on that list is the "RE<C Initiative"
<http://www.google.org/rec.html>

Some of it's videos have 8 (now 9 I guess) views. I'm confused as it's not a
major project and hardly anything to cancel. This must be the most press it's
ever had.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Internally at Google it was a lot bigger deal, mostly because of the huge
power budget of data centers.

Personally, I'm surprised they killed it. The team was fairly small, and they
had made some good progress on various initiatives. Perhaps if they had moved
them under the Google Power company [1] it would have made more sense.

[1] [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/google-applies-
to-b...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/google-applies-to-become-
power-marketer/)

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vicngtor
Glad to see Google focusing their resources on more critical projects such as
Android and Wallet.

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talir
It is good to focus. I get that Google can only do this by killing projects
that are not working.

The problems that many of these killed initiatives are trying to solve, often
have successful solutions being built outside of google. Google Wave, for
example. If Google doesn't have the right team working on a project, I wonder
if other teams inside Google have chances to take on failed projects before
they are killed. Another team might make it work.

~~~
falling
It is sad, though, when Google entering the market killed a successful
solution built outside of Google. Google Wave, for example.

~~~
true_religion
What did Google Wave kill?

~~~
falling
Etherpad and any other web collaborative text editors businesses.

~~~
timrichard
I think 'kill' is a strong term to use. Although the original Etherpad service
was terminated some time after aquisition, the source was released in
December, 2009 :

<https://github.com/ether/pad>

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ww520
Someone should build a website to maintain all the projects Google killed.
They might not be suitable to Google but someone else could build on the
ideas.

~~~
engtech
I'm sure it varies by project, but as has been said before when Google kills
things, a lot of their projects require the core Google infrastructure
(BigTable?) that isn't open sourced so it isn't possible to spin the project
out.

~~~
MaysonL
I wonder if I'm the only one who thinks that Google could make a lot more
money, and have a lot more impact, if they opened up the "core Google
infrastructure" for [paid] uses by outsiders than Google AppEngine is ever
going to get them.

~~~
marshallp
App engine at this point is pretty much all their infrastucture opened up -
you got short/long running processes, big table, blobstore, and map reduce.
You don't get c or assembly but you get golang which is pretty close.

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obtu
Too bad about the bookmark lists, I've found some interesting ones. They were
coming up for query-by-a-handful-of-examples (à la google sets and grids),
just not very well known.

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martythemaniak
It makes sense, if you think of how many engineers that saves them and
conversely, how much more work they'll be able to get done elsewhere.

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icegreentea
This was the first time I'd even heard of Google bookmarks. Which is kind of
annoying since for the last 6 months or so, at least once a week, I'd wished
that something like that existed (instead of my hilarious google doc full of
urls).

So off I go looking for it... not listed under more... or even more. Go google
for it (duh), find it... and WHOA blast to the past. Doesn't even have the
black bar shoe horned in.

~~~
cpeterso
You might like Pinboard ("Social Bookmarking for Introverts"):

<http://pinboard.in/>

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luriel
Could this mean there is still hope for Google Code Search? I hope so!

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marshallp
There's an also another thing that nobody seems to be discussing. What is that
google is secretly cooking up in the google x lab. Larry and Sergey are
ambitious guys, and the fact that they're shedding energy plan and knol, and
that sergey isn't focusing much on google+ (the massive facebook threat) but
instead on x lab means they've got to be gearing up to drop a serious scifi
bomb on the scale of the google car (or bigger).

