For a long, long time I was a Google+ user. I met many great friends who I continue to talk today because of that social network. It felt like the social in social network was there, and without any ads, ironically. I used pretty much all of their features with the exception of the games they tried to push. Now the consumer version has been shut down after a security breach was revealed and what’s left of it has been handed over to the Enterprise as Currents. Google+ has been on the death bed since Vic Gundotra, the co-founder, left the company in 2014. It seems the security breach was used an excuse to shut it down.
What I’m describing here sounds like an isolated case of one Google’s most beloved service shutting down but, in fact, it isn’t. Google Talk, Google Reader, Chromecast Audio, Google Nexus, Picasa, Orkut, Google TV, Quickoffice, and plenty more have all shut down and the reason why is often the same. A better version was created by a different team.
The shutdown of Google Talk is a prime example of this problem. Talk was a XMPP-based chat service that allowed anyone on another XMPP service to communicate with and vice versa— this is what’s known as a Federated service. It was included when you got a Gmail. Then Hangouts was created as part of Google+. It allowed for not only chat but video calls, although it had nothing in common with Talk. Talk would be shutdown in favor of Hangouts as it was superior in it’s features but at the cost of a vendor lock-in. This is a trend that would repeat itself time and time again.
Google+ is the rare exception but it did replace previous social networks that had shutdown in the wake of Google+’s rise. It looked like they had a winner until Vic Gundotra left. No one brought Google’s excuse for shutting it down and it only shed light to other services that had closed previously.
I had always been subconsciously aware of Google’s tendency to create duplicate services and shutdown their older services since my friend kept blowing the whistle on their inability to keep a chat service for more then a year or two. The announcement of Stadia was left with praise but also brought with it the unfortunate question of “how long will it be around?” — to paraphrase. A Kotaku journalist asked such question to the lead behind the upcoming service. All they could do was acknowledge the problem but it doesn’t leave much hope for the future. All of this creates a real lack of trust in the company that I’ve started to migrate to alternatives whenever possible.
Sadly, there is not much I myself can do and who knows if those with louder voices would be able to change Google’s behavior. The problem is embedded in the company’s culture and has been for years. So far the only product and/or service I can guarantee will be around for a long time is Search, Ads, Gmail, YouTube, Chrome and Android. Technically, the latter two are the most autonomous of that group, despite Google’s influence, and will exist in one form or another because of their open source nature, regardless of what Google does to them.
In fact, Google’s active open source projects are the only thing that have any sort of future. That’s the only good news I can give you.
