Google has announced plans to terminate several of its products and services, some of which might impact business users, in an effort to improve and create a better user experience for its most popular products and features.
Those on the chopping block this Fall include Google Video for Business, Apps for Teams, Google Listen, and many of Google’s blogs.
Google has already made changes to about 50 of its products, services and features within the past year. Google stated that it wants to carefully consider which products deserve focus, and spend more time and effort on making its remaining features better.
Google Video for Business is a video hosting and sharing solution that allows business owners and professionals to use video for internal communication. Those who have videos stored can migrate those videos over to Google Drive, which offers similar storage and sharing capabilities, this Fall. Videos that migrate from Google Video for Business will be stored for free and won’t count against users’ storage quota on Google Drive.
Google Apps for Teams allows business users to collaborate on non-email applications like Google Docs or Google Calendar using their verified business email account. Google says it is shutting down this feature because it was not as useful for people as Google had originally anticipated. On September 4, 2012, the Team accounts will be converted into personal Google accounts.
Google Listen helped users discover new podcasts, a feature that Google says has been made irrelevant because of Google Play. As for its blogs, Google has said that it will cut an unspecified number of its more than 150 blogs, but it will not reduce the overall post quantity. Instead, it will consolidate some of its content into its more popular blogs.
Google is constantly changing its offerings due to new technology and ideas, but some of its products and services simply don’t take off like others. These consolidation efforts could prove to be beneficial for users of Google’s remaining products and services, but others might miss the features that are being cut.
Google Video has been dead for a few years now, I didn’t know it was still active as YouTube is Google’s go to video source. As long as they Keep Google Apps, I’m happy!
Robinsh
I don’t think Google will retire any of the service where users are happy and using for growing their business.
Google video and Apps for teams like services might have very small user base and hence they choose to retire them and no doubt there are number of services available as there alternative too.
We try to never consider any Google products to stay free or around forever. One of the largest impacts to our business was Google merchant service moving from free to paid. We new it was coming, but it was nice to have that free traffic while it lasted.
EMF Group Team
Routine Google behavior. However, they never cut out anything that relates to how we use them. If they start cutting out ad or search options let us know.