More Google Products Getting the Ax

Internet giant Google has recently announced that many of their products will be discontinued. This includes its personalized home page service called iGoogle.

The default Google home page has been praised for its simplicity. You get the Google logo, a search box, plus links to access some of the other Google products or to get more information on the company. When Google first launched, this is what set them apart from other search engines, which were often complete portals of information, with different categories of websites, news feeds, weather, links to the search engine's other services such as e-mail, plus of course many banner ads. The iGoogle service was launched for people who wanted to have more “at a glance” information on their home page, such as weather, a clock, news updates, etc.

But now that there are plenty of independent apps that can run within a browser or on a mobile device which do these functions, the need for iGoogle has decreased and so has its user base, which explains why Google has decided to get rid of the service.

Some other products that are shutting down are the Google Mini hardware search appliance, which has been replaced by other hardware and software products. The Google Symbian Search App will be gone soon, mainly due to the fact that Symbian based smartphones are largely falling into disuse now. Google Video could arguably have been “dead” for quite some time now, if it wasn't for the fact that Google still let videos that were uploaded to the service be displayed online, even if the service has been closed to new uploads back in 2009. The Google Video service is now largely redundant thanks to the acquisition of video sharing site YouTube by Google. Those who have videos on the old Google Video platform will get their content automatically migrated onto YouTube in August.

The fact that Google is shutting down some of its services shouldn't really come as much of a surprise to internet users. Google is a company that has always innovated and sought to expand its reach in the online world after its search engine had immense success. Now Google has many products besides search, such as advertising solutions, a social network, an email service, a web hosting service, plus a whole lot more.

Some Google products never really gained much steam and were canned shortly after they were made available to the public. Others have had their run, but they either outlived its usefulness or they have been replaced by another product that includes their function and can do the job better. It is thus logical that Google would want to consolidate their product line and not waste their time and money keeping alive products that are no longer attracting a sizable amount of users. The shut downs are by no means an indication that Google is having problems, as the company keeps innovating, making new acquisitions and releasing new products on a regular basis.