Google has announced that it will kill off one of its flagship products, the Google Reader by 1st July. Google Reader is an aggregator of content that is served by web feeds through which users can pull together their favorite Web content in one place. This is in keeping with its “Spring Cleaning”, that begun around 2011, which has put the kibosh into a litany of 70 products. This is despite the large following Google Reader has enjoyed since its inception in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Senior Vice President Urs Holzle said in a post that Reader was gradually losing popularity with the masses.
“While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined,” Holzle wrote in a post, on the official Google blog.
“It’s been a long time since we have had this rate of change — it probably hasn’t happened since the birth of personal computing 40 years ago,” he wrote. “To make the most of these opportunities, we need to focus — otherwise we spread ourselves too thin and lack impact.
Some of the additional products on the chopping board include:
Apps Script which will be deprecating the GUI Builder and five UiApp widgets in order to focus efforts on Html Service.
CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers, but will be discontinued for other developers from September 16, 2013. .
Google Building Maker will be retired on June 1 which has helped people to make three-dimensional building models for Google Earth and Maps.
Google Cloud Connect which is a plug-in to help people work in the cloud by automatically saving Microsoft Office files from Windows PCs in Google Drive, will no longer be available as of April 30th.
For the Blackberry users who would like to continue tu use Google voice, Google recommends they use their HTML5 app, which is more secure and easier for us to keep up to date.
Google is also deprecating their Search API for Shopping, which has enabled developers to create shopping apps based on Google’s Product Search data.
This is very commendable by Google especially in this age of tweets and Facebook likes, as it will ensure they doesn’t spread too thin until they lose their market focus. Consequently, focusing on fewer products and thus having a bigger impact on the market, that eventually leads to customer satisfaction.