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Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

lemonde.fr

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Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#11

Post by joezydeco »

s_dev wrote: post #5

Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do. Google Answers was destroyed by Yahoo Answers - you could see the approach they were going for though - a properly answered question can be shown again and again. SO seemed to strike a balance between the two.

As a Google Answers verified researcher (gee, am I breaking my NDA by stating this?), and this is speaking from my perspective, the project closed/failed for reasons other than Yahoo!'s rise in the area.

GA worked quite well at first. There were some very active users that did excellent work and got paid quite nicely for their efforts. But a vague set of rule changes started to migrate in.

For example, a non-verified observer could comment on a question and pretty much give the entire answer. An official GA Researcher would answer the the question above the line, and the response from Google would be "Well, you didn't add any information to this topic than what was already on the page, so no payment for you". Riiiiight.

There were other little quirks and then eventually Google announced one day it was over. That's just how it rolled with them. I'm chalking it up to shiny things elsewhere that took attention away from GA. I did get a nice fleecy blanket as a Christmas gift one year. Not sure why.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#12

Post by at-fates-hands »

How many of these were companies acquired by Google, and then dismantled after the project didn't gain traction?

Not bashing Google, but there's always posts on Medium about how some startup got bought by Google, promised they wouldn't change anything and within a few months, simply dropped the project and laid off the employees.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#13

Post by alextingle »

Navarr wrote: post #2

I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects. Google checkout turned into Google Wallet. Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul. There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them. Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the…

Google Code was awesome, and there's no real replacement for it. koders.com* doesn't even come close.

* - now code.openhub.net

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#15

Post by skj »

alextingle wrote: post #13
Navarr wrote: post #2

I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects. Google checkout turned into Google Wallet. Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul. There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them. Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the…

Google Code was awesome, and there's no real replacement for it. koders.com* doesn't even come close. * - now code.openhub.net

github isn't a replacement?

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#16

Post by kedean »

jmilloy wrote: post #6
Navarr wrote: post #2

I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects. Google checkout turned into Google Wallet. Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul. There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them. Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the…

As you suggest, just because some idea was dropped doesn't mean that Google did the wrong thing. But, it also doesn't mean that they didn't abandon the idea, so it ends up here in a list. I don't see any general Google bashing yet. Similarly, I'd put a phonograph in a museum, even though it's features have been replaced by other things.

I'm not a google apologist, but the list definitely has a few undeserved products. The most obvious is Writely, which was simply rebranded to Google Docs, then further rebranded to Google Drive. The writely.com domain even redirects to Drive.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#17

Post by adamkochanowicz »

onion2k wrote: post #10
s_dev wrote: post #5

Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do. Google Answers was destroyed by Yahoo Answers - you could see the approach they were going for though - a properly answered question can be shown again and again. SO seemed to strike a balance between the two.

Google Wave was a collaborative editor. It was nothing like Slack or HipChat (unless I've managed to really misunderstand Slack despite building a few things on top of it). It's problem was that it didn't have a purpose - no one really knew what to do with it because a "Wave" was presented an amorphous blob of "knowledge" that people could contribute to at the same time. It was an online notepad, sketchbook, and spre…

Wave was a replacement to email, not exactly an online "notepad." It wasn't about documents at all, no more so than email today is.

So you're right that it's not like Slack or Hipchat, but I think you may also misunderstand its purpose.

Re: Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google

#20

Post by acdha »

s_dev wrote: post #5

Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do. Google Answers was destroyed by Yahoo Answers - you could see the approach they were going for though - a properly answered question can be shown again and again. SO seemed to strike a balance between the two.

> Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do.

That's somewhat true for certain technical aspects but it's too quick to ignore the mistakes Google made and minimize the value of work which more successful products put into the user experience.

Google never made the case for why using Wave would benefit you; as with Buzz, Plus, etc. Googlers reported liking it because they had both critical mass and pressure to use it long enough to see the benefits but few people outside did.

Instead, what we did hear about a lot was the technology which was going to change the world right up until it failed. This is a common failure mode for Google where the strong engineering culture crowds out UX, forgetting that for almost any product that's an implementation detail which most people shouldn't need to care about.

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