14 DAY TRIAL // Under the leadership of new CEO Larry Page, Google is focusing on fewer products with bigger impact. As such, may side-projects, obscure products and ones that never really got off the ground, or got the chance to, are being put to sleep.
Already, Google has said it is shutting down Google Labs and many of its experiments. All of the Slide products are dead as well, before they got a chance to shine.
Now, Google is talking about ten more products and projects that will be terminated.
Among them, are some pretty big names which had bigger promises than they eventually managed to keep, like Aardvark.
Most though are things most people haven't heard about and that they won't miss. Google Desktop or Fast Flip are perfect examples.
Google is best off moving the people working on them to more successful products.
"Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. The list is below. This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience," Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President at Google, wrote.
"It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people. All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products," he explained.
"As for our users, we’ll communicate directly with them as we make these changes, giving sufficient time to make the transition and enabling them to take their data with them," he added.
The full list of products being shut down in this latest round is: Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki and Subscribed Links.
Google has some explanation for why each of the products is being killed off and some have dedicated posts on their blogs, if you want more info, but the gist of it is that these were products that few people used and that were going nowhere.