Google has been on a mission ovet the past year to trim the number of products and features it supports, and the latest batch of pink slips came today. Among the soon-to-be-gone features Senior Engineering Director Yassi Matias highlighted in a Friday-afternoon blog post are separate Google storage accounts, and Insights for Search, which has been merged into Google Trends.
The evolving storage situation might be the one that gets most users up in arms, though. As Matias explained:
“Google storage in Picasa and Drive will be consolidated over the next few months, so users will have five GB of free storage across both services. If you’re paying for storage, your free storage will now be counted towards your total. So if you buy a 100GB plan, it will give you 100GB of total storage instead of adding adding to what you already had. We believe this approach will make it much easier for users. For both free and paid storage, people at or near their current storage limits will have the same amount of storage after this change.”
Other features getting the axe this time around are AdSense for Feeds, Classic Plus, Spreadsheet Gadgets, Google News Badges and Recommended Sections, Places Directory and +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools. Some have been superseded by newer, arguably better tools, while others are just being retired.
Google has been following its “more wood behind fewer arrows” approach since July 2011 when co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO. One of the first things to go — and to some chagrin from users — was Google Labs. Google’s last round of product cuts came this past July, when it announced it was getting rid of Google Video and iGoogle, among other services.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Eric Von Seggern.
