14 DAY TRIAL // Google is clearly undergoing a big transformation, a rather slow but noticeable one. As with each transformation, some things get left behind, Google has just announced that its Labs program will be shut down.
Individual labs experiments will be either rolled into other products, live as stand-alone ones or be killed off.
Labs sections for Google products, like Gmail Labs, Maps Labs, YouTube TestTube and so on, will not be affected by this move and won't be shut down as well.
Google says the move was necessary as it wants to focus on a smaller number of bigger products rather than spread its resources across the field, "more wood behind fewer arrows" as CEO Larry Page put it last week.
"We’ve decided to wind down Google Labs," Bill Coughran, SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure at Google, wrote.
"While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead," he added.
Labs has been the home of many experimental products, though most of them never graduate or gain too much popularity.
Labs itself wasn't a coherent project, it was the place where Google creations went when they had nowhere else to go, because they were too experimental or catered to a very specific niche.
Still, it's hard to ignore the fact that projects like Labs have been part of the Google culture and part of what made the company special. While a greater focus on the important products makes sense, this is the type of move a big corporation would do.
Sadly, while it may be the last to admit it, Google has become the big corporation it always feared it would. Still, maybe the new CEO Larry Page is on to something, he's the one behind the new, more focused approach, and maybe he'll be able to breathe new life into the company.
Labs is hardly the only Google product to be shut down lately, Google Health and Google Powermeter, both of which were underperforming according to Google metrics, will be shut down in the near future.