Google has continued its summer clean, shutting down three more products as it focuses on its core business to compete with the likes of Apple and Facebook.
Google has continued its summer clean, shutting down three more products as it focuses on its core business to compete with the likes of Apple and Facebook.
Podcast app ‘Listen’, collaboration tool Google Apps for Teams and internal video app Google Video for Business are all to be phased out.
The move follows a year of cut backs at the firm as it looks to concentrate on key areas such as search, mobile and social. Last month, Google decided to axe iGoogle and Google Video.
Google Apps for Teams was introduced in 2008 to allow people with a verified business or school email address to collaborate using non-email applications from Google, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Google has now realized that the service was not as useful for people as it had originally anticipated.
Apps for Teams is scheduled to be phased out, beginning September 4 2012. Existing Google Apps for Teams accounts will be turned into personal Google Accounts. The change will not affect other editions of Google Apps.
The Android app, Google Listen was launched in 2009 to enable Android users to discover and listen to podcasts. With Google Play now available, people have wider access to a variety of podcast apps. So Google has decided to discontinue Listen. People who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1 this year, the podcast search won’t work. The podcast subscriptions can be accessed in Google Reader in the “Listen Subscriptions” folder and can be downloaded via the Import/ Export tab.
Google Video for Business allowed Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education customers to use video for internal communication. All videos hosted on Google Video for Business will be transferred over to Google Drive, which is Google’s cloud storage service, and has similar sharing and hosting capabilities. The videos will be stored for free and will not count against a user’s Google Drive storage limit.
The announcements were made through a post on their blog that they are shutting down a few mobile and web services.
“Over the past year, we’ve made changes to around 50 products, features and services—donating, merging and shutting things down so we can focus on the high-impact products that millions of people use, multiple times a day,” said Max Ibel, Director of Engineering.
“Technology has the power to change people’s lives. But to make a difference, we need to carefully consider what to focus on, and make hard decisions about what we won’t pursue. This enables us to devote more time and resources giving you products you love, and making them better for you.”
Google has also decided to shut down some of its blogs, which are either updated infrequently or redundant with other blogs. “Finally, Google maintains 150+ blogs and other communications channels about our products and services, and so over time we’ll also be closing a number of Google-created blogs that are either updated infrequently, or are redundant with other blogs. This doesn’t mean that we’ll be sharing any less information—we’ll just be posting our updates on our more popular channels,” concluded the blog post.
Read the official Google blog post here.
