Google is on a belated New Year’s resolution kick that will see the search giant end some services like its Google Message Continuity (GMS) email disaster recovery product and open-source Google Sky Map while collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University to develop it for student projects.
“As we head into 2012, we’ve been sticking to some old resolutions—the need to focus on building amazing products that millions of people love to use every day,” Dave Girouard, Google’s vice president of product management, wrote Friday on the company’s official blog. “That means taking a hard look at products that replicate other features, haven’t achieved the promise we had hoped for or can’t be properly integrated into the overall Google experience.”
Girouard said the enterprise-targeted GMS product, which backs up emails sent and received via on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers, was being phased out because Google has “decided to focus our efforts” on disaster recovery solutions built into Google Apps. Current customers will be able to continue using GMC for the duration of their contracts, however.
Other Google products being phased out in 2012 include the Needlebase data management, platform, which goes dark on June 1, though it might be integrated into other platforms, the Picnik online photo editor (paid members will get a refund “in the coming weeks,” according to Girouard), the Social Graph API, which is getting shut down on April 20 because it “isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like,” and the Urchin online web analytics platform which has been superseded by Google Analytics and will be closed by March.
In addition to phasing out and open-sourcing some services, Girouard said Google would be merging some old but underutilized products with others, but didn’t specify any beyond the possibility of parts of Needlebase surviving in “other data-related initiatives.”
[pcmag]
