Here’s why Google is killing so many of its projects

There have been a lot of words written on the internet about the products and services that Google has killed. There is almost certainly a service or material that Google sent to the grave that has significantly affected you. I know I have done it, both at work and in my spare time.

While there are websites that only exist to tell us about things Google killed, very little is said about it. Why Google does. Google, like Microsoft (which killed its fair share of things) or Apple (ditto on the murder), wants you to love it as a business. If you don’t like a certain company, you stop using their products. He doesn’t kill anything without what he thinks is a good reason. Google simply either has more products or kills them before they can lose enough money to affect the results.

This is the thing: Google may have different reasons for stopping different products, but one thing in common each time is a consideration for the end result. Google is not a charity and only exists to make as much money as possible. While it may have started as a brilliant idea in a garage somewhere, Google is now one of the largest and most valuable companies in the world. Officials want this to continue.

The problem of scale

Google is too big for everyone to work together on everything and is split into several smaller, more manageable teams. These groups each have a central purpose and sometimes this changes or is merged into its parent. Look at Inbox as an example. You might have used Inbox and loved it, but it’s dead and now you need to use another Gmail client. Even though it died as a standalone app, the idea and implementation is still alive and well and integrated into Gmail apps for Android, iOS, and the web. Part of Inbox is still there, at least in the mind – the parts that Google says are making the most of its strengths.

Good ideas never die at Google; they are just merged into money making apps.

The same can be said for other applications. Google News and Weather combined with Google Reader to bring us Google News. You still have your local news settings and curated lists of national and tech news, but it’s in a different package. Indeed, Google spends a lot of time experimenting and trying to find a way to give us what we want in the most efficient way – and to serve ads as effectively as possible.

Some of those experiences die, like Google+. Others are switching to a full-blown profitable product, like Google Fi (formerly Project Fi) or Google Assistant (formerly Google Now). We just don’t like changes and our first instinct is to lament that Google has killed something we love to use.

How Google innovates

These dead products and iterations are really just a by-product of how Google is innovating. Google likes to act quickly to compete in a specific way and then take the time to ask questions like how it can best do it once it has already started. Google has very fierce competition from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft for almost every one of its potential lucrative products and services. He cannot afford to take it slow and take the time to make the “final” decision and stick to it. Google likes to brainstorm ideas and see if they stick.

Google Tez was a huge success, so all that was good became Google Pay.

Google Pay is a recent example that comes to mind. Competition from Apple and Amazon is fierce when it comes to payments, and Google has fallen behind because it didn’t act quickly enough. One of the things he threw at the proverbial wall was Tez, an exclusively Indian payment system that quickly became popular. Google has since shut down Google Tez and turned it into Google Pay.

Google Tez has been successful, but Google is also quick to kill a product it says will never succeed. Most of them are services and products you’ve never heard of, like Google Fusion Tables or specialized rack servers for internal corporate search engines. If something isn’t creating revenue and there’s no way to turn it into something that does, Google is stepping in.

Killing products and innovation goes hand in hand in other ways. All you have to do is look at Google’s chat strategy to see this. Hangouts, Allo, and Google Talk are dead or dying.

You never know what Google is going to kill next.

Google Messages tries to take the best parts of everyone and put them together into one Google Chat app. Will it be successful? No one knows, not even Google. He just knows he has to keep trying until he finds the right formula, no matter how long it takes or how many different apps he has to use.

Will google kill [my favorite service] next?

People feel real anxiety about Google’s product line, especially those that are on the fringes of profitability or those the company plans to experiment with. Five years after starting its Pixel Project, despite building some of the best Android phones, it probably isn’t making a lot of money; Could Google kill its line of smartphones? Unlikely at this point, but it’s definitely something I think of as a Pixel fan.

People are worried about what Google will kill next, and that sentiment is justified.

What about Stadia? Google has been on the cloud gaming platform for a year and is attracting AAA games and signing deals with major publishers, but there is still a lingering suspicion that unlike Xbox and PlayStation, Google could pull away. taking at any time. Game developers have told us they’re hesitant to invest too much time in Stadia not only because the comeback isn’t here yet, but because Google’s story of killing unsuccessful projects could leave them in the dark. hole in a few years, or the public may feel the same way and simply choose to avoid the platform altogether.

The most recent murder, the Nest Secure, has led to thousands of people complaining about ending up with expensive hardware that won’t be supported any longer. And after a long, slow expiration, Google Play Music played its final notes this week, although its replacement, YouTube Music, still hasn’t inherited all of its features. It’s a mess.

And Google hasn’t finished killing products; you never know what will be the next step on the chopping block. Outside of the basics like search, Google Ads, and Gmail, every product is fair game if Google thinks it can do it better.