"killed" implies it ceased to exist, so I think it's misleading to include rebrandings or relaunches where functionality gets folded into another product.<p>At a glance...<p>* Nexus wasn't killed, it was re branded into Pixel. Nexus had been trending toward premium and the Pixel switch cemented that.<p>* Googles was more-or-less replaced by Lens. Not a pure rebrand, but two products with the same idea.<p>* Google Now has essentially been folded into the expanding behemoth that is Assistant. I don't care for that kind of feature, but AFAICT they're fairly similar.<p>* Quickoffice was an acquisition that was promptly folded into Docs/Sheets/etc.
Building products/features and then killing them when they don't work is generally fine. And renaming/merging/consolidating them isn't really killing them. But…<p>> Sparrow was an email client for OS X and iOS. They acquired and then killed it. It was over 1 year old.<p>Buying then killing is sad. Acquihire I guess?<p>> Google Reader was a RSS/Atom feed aggregator. It was over 7 years old.<p>These are the ones that feel like they hurt the internet. That was seven critical years for RSS/Atom. Investing time/money in building feed aggregators/readers meant competing against the might of Google and a $0 price point.
The list is very long. I really wish a rebranding or renaming or merging of services was somehow listed or displayed separately. This would give a better idea of the services actually killed.
Why does this keep resurfacing? Yes, Google tries some things out, they make value assessments and move forward with what they believe will benefit them. It seems the general consensus is that Google 'hates' or 'doesn't care' about its users when it cancels a project/product.<p>Sometimes even with almost unlimited resources (Windows phone) the plan just doesn't work out. I don't get why the tech community in general likes to harp on them for it.
> Google Allo is an instant messaging mobile app by Google. It will be rebranded as Google Chat.<p>Does not sound like it was killed if it will continue to live with a new name.
I dony see what the issue is they are doing technical debt right.<p>The ones that worry me are aws, their technical debt would be hugggee with all those services and they keep piling it on, now maintaining their own elastic search repo!<p>Eventually some of the older service have to give and with there lock-in not lock-in it will hurt some -just a thought
Google+ and goo.gl are currently being archived by the ArchiveTeam, goo.gl as part of the URLTeam and G+ in a dedicated project. My warrior already uploaded over 100GB of content and in total the project has saved 149TB of data from google's endless thirst for killing things.
In a somewhat disingenuous site, the webmaster left out the granddaddy of them all: Google Search[0]<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19387010" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19387010</a>
This reads more like a dedication to R&D than a list of shame.<p>I understand why / how people are pissed, I got pissed at some of those too, yet I do also accept my overall quality of digital life is improved by these bold moves in the long run.
Google Wave was a lot of fun back on the day, they were just experimenting with real-time editing that ended up in Docs, but it sure led to some crazy conversations :)