“The Google Cemetery website lists 44 dead Google products — the latest being Google+, which was discontinued in October 2018,” Tom Foremski writes for ZDNet. “It’s somewhat shocking to see large Google products or services suddenly abandoned despite years of work — seven years for Google+.”
“There’s many more services that Google closed after investing a lot of engineering work such as: Google Wave, Google Gears, Google Talk, Picasa, iGoogle, Google Reader, and Code Search, etc.,” Foremski writes. “Some of these services might’ve also had several million users when Google shut them down. It has invested thousands of man-years of software engineers — a scarce resource — and thrown much of that work away.”
“The failure rate is even higher if you count the Google X moonshot projects, which haven been shunted off to a separate division under parent company Alphabet,” Foremski writes. “Why is Google so bad at successfully innovating new products and services? Will it ever be able to diversify from its core advertising and search business? Google hates marketing, and it doesn’t understand the role of marketing in building a successful business.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We don’t call refer to Google as Our Lady of Transitory Endeavor for nothing.
It’s ironic that a company that makes much of its revenue from selling advertising, doesn’t understand how to do it for themselves.
