With each end of the year AD, we find that the common thing on the Internet is the exit of many listings articles that talk about services, applications, and common products “sometimes short-term” that Google Incorporation has killed during that year.
Whoever follows Killed by Google and Google Cemetry finds that Google sends regularly many of its products and services to these two sites, which regularly monitor the latest services and products that Google has ended its existence.
This Google-style tells us that it is always enthusiastic about adventure, in any new field that you see pushing its business forward, and this is one of the critical reasons for its success. The risk of launching new products inevitably leads to leaving a number of these products, services, and applications that come out of service to make room for the newcomer, but this is the price that it must pay to create new products.
More importantly, there is a powerful alternative in which Google invests, and many of these dead products are in fact an important step towards something better and more successful, many of which if Google does not end their existence completely it will benefit from them in one way or another whether changing its brand or merging it with an existing product or, it was launched as an independent company, but under the umbrella of the alphabet company, but why does Google kill its products and services almost constantly?
Failure is sometimes the best way to succeed
In fact, the expired products are just a by-product of innovation and so Google moves quickly in its business, competing with giant companies like Amazon that need to try new things, and at the same time stop stopping things when they don’t work. No one does not like failure, especially in Silicon Valley, but failure quickly has become a well-known philosophy for Silicon Valley companies. The products that Google suspended forever seemed once sophisticated products and are the basis for better ideas that the company launches in time to flourish later, and failure can lead to success, and like any experience that has chances of success or failure, companies work to offer more products and services with the goal of building a strong relationship with users and looking at how they use the products.
Google loves market research to find out user behavior
Google’s strategy has always been to pay attention to market research, and through conducting market research, the company tries to design and launch a product that suits the expectations of people and is a way of life for the company, and with the amazing amount of capital that is at its disposal, it follows the principle if there is a bright and smart idea, it puts it on the market directly for people to test.
The closest example of this is the Tez app, which was a telephone payment service by Google targeting users in India, and since the launch of the application, more than 55 million people have installed the application and used by more than 22 million people in addition to the companies that use it in their transactions of finance every month. These numbers were an instant indication to Google that the app might be better off if it was developed and given a universally accepted name. Immediately, the company stopped the Tez app about 3 months ago and changed its brand to Google Pay. It was officially launched recently, so Google now has a unified global payments service that integrates with the previous product.
The same thing happened with some of the applications that we use now, such as Panoramio, whose name turned to Google Maps Views, and Google News & Weather where the company merged with the Newsstand application in one service called Google News, and the Allo application, which changed its brand to Chat, And Project Tango, which is considered an augmented reality API, the company has replaced it by launching ARCore.
Sometimes poor products are the problem
While some Google products and services simply need a better brand, there are many examples of projects that were simply terminated because they weren’t good enough, often due to bugs or low user engagement. Google has stated that the main reason for the termination of the “Picasa” image service is that it wants to focus its efforts “entirely on a single photo service”, which is Google Photo Service via the platform on the Internet. Also, over the past decade, Google has decided to shut down its Orkut service because it has not found that growth unlike its competitors such as Facebook and YouTube.
In April 2015, Google officially closed the “Helpouts” service and explained that the service “did not grow” as quickly as expected, and more recently, specifically in October 2018, Google announced that it will officially shut down its social network Google+, and the main reason is the low number of users in addition to the serious security vulnerability in which it appeared. But however, the downside of finishing products is that there will always be someone unhappy and even if the product doesn’t spread widely, there are always some people who like this product.
Some people have argued that Google is killing its products without adequate study and just as a whim of it such as its application for reading Google Reader, its service to shorten links, Code Search, Picasa, and many other products and services that the company should not stop. Finally, terminated products and services can teach us a lot about the priorities of corporations, especially giant ones, and perhaps even about the people who use them – people like us – in the end, yet discontinued products and services are a product of the growth philosophy, and given that companies are looking to expand on new markets, it is likely that some products will get a large portion of the disregard that leads to death.
