As part of its continued pursuit of “focus” Google is shutting down five more products. That includes Google Video, iGoogle, Google Mini, Google Talk Chatback and its Symbian Search App, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday afternoon.
Google Mini is being retired on July 31 after seven years because it’s basically redundant, Google says, thanks to Google Search Appliance, Google Site Search and Google Commerce Search. In place of Google Talk Chatback, the company is encouraging users to switch to the Meebo Bar, which Google now owns thanks to its purchase of Meebo last month. The Symbian Search App is being retired so Google can “focus out efforts on our mobile web search experience” — also, Symbian’s market share of mobile devices has dropped like a rock and Google cares about improving Android search more.
iGoogle isn’t actually going anywhere until November 2013, but Google is giving longtime users a heads up to plan to move their data. Google Video, on the other hand, has been dormant for three years. Users have until August to download their videos from the site before they’re deleted forever.
The impetus for all of this housecleaning, announced last summer, was to get the company to focus on “higher-impact products.” CEO Larry Page said that he wanted the search giant to concentrate on “simplifying and streamlining our product lines” in order to put “more wood behind fewer arrows.”
In the last year and a half Google has shut down 30 properties, including Slide, Google Health, Google Power Meter, Google Labs and Aaardvark. But a year on, it’s not clear the company has adhered that closely to his matra. At Google I/O the company was showing off several new tangential Google products at Google I/O like its own tablet, the Nexus 7; experimental Project Glass; the Nexus Q living room device; and its own infrastructure-as-a-service offering, Cloud Compute Engine.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- NewNet Market Overview, Q2 2010
- Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
- Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
