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How long does Google let projects and services live?

So, here’s the long and short:

We can expect Google Keep to last about to March 2017.  Don’t fall in love.

I found this chart below interesting.  At the end of this post I’ll make some small predictions.

How long should we expect Google Keep to last?

http://boingboing.net/2013/03/23/how-long-should-we-expect-goog.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

“On the Guardian, Charles Arthur has totted up the lifespan of 39 products and services that Google has killed off in the past due to insufficient public interest. One interesting finding is that Google is becoming less patient with its less popular progeny, with an accelerating trend to killing off products that aren’t cutting it.”

So here’s some predictions based entirely on my intuition:

1. Google is definitely making a wristwatch (then again – so is everyone – Apple, MS, FB, etc.). Geeks just love Dick Tracy.

2. Google Reader was killed to make room for some new product initiative that hasn’t been announced yet.

2a. The mess with Google Alerts is tied to the changes planned for G+ and Google Scholar as well as the watch(besides just chaos in the backroom).

3. Google will kill all their RSS stuff and integrate those features into some revitalized broader product.

4. That broader product will be some overlap or replacement for Google+ and/or Google Scholar.

5.  Google will introduce some scholarly features in Google with some reinvention of advanced search and citations services as well as scholarly impact factors.

6. Microsoft and Bing will bring an advanced scholarly search and publishing system to the market.

7.  Google+is still a wasteland delivering little of value.  I’ll still play with the whole bunch of social media but Twitter and Facebook are still my social media of choice.

In my opinion, part of these changes will relate to the need to advertise and promote things to the sweet spot of advertisers – those people who are young adults (just like the TV ads) and those who have lifetime better prospects due to higher education and higher income.  Follow the money, are Google’s choices made around quality search and experiences or around revenue?  Creating products for a key target allows Google to charge more for ads and clicks and segment their markets is the goal.  Those institutions of higher education that promote the Google suite of products and pure commerically driven algorithmic search (as apposed to promoting cognitive choice and critical thinking) are serving up their students and scholars to commercial interests and abdicating their role to create scholars who think as they search and choose.

Stephen

 

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Posted on: March 25, 2013, 7:14 am Category: Uncategorized

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