Title: Google Puts Lid on New Products
via LA Times

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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google6oct06,1,1629177.story?coll=la-headlines-business&ctrack=1&cset=true

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From the article:
"In another sign of Google Inc.'s growth from start-up to corporate behemoth, the company's top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better."

From the article:
"More than 50 products in various stages of development are available across Google's websites. There are so many that the company has collected 35 on a site called "More Google products," which includes digital maps, instant-messaging software, programs that speed up Web surfing and even a search engine for mail-order catalogs."

Analyst Comments:
"They created a bunch of crap that they have no idea what to do with," Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said of Google. "What a huge waste of resources."

Google Responds:
"Google admitted this year that its internal audits discovered that the company had been spending too much time on new services to the detriment of its core search engine."

The new services have not just been to the detriment of its core search engine, but also to the detriment of other out-of-beta services.

For example, the email notification part of Google answers (which sends an email to customers and researchers whenever the other has posted something new to the question) has been broken for over six months. The Google Answers service is barely usable without the email notifications, and question numbers have been steadily dropping in recent months, yet nothing gets done about it.

It can't be more than a day's programming (for one person) to fix it.

I think the updates to Reader and Groups etc. are evidence to this.

However I think it is interesting that the article states they canceled some new products, but didn't drop them, rather focused on integrating them into current products. I don't think they are really developing less new ideas, just integrating them earlier rather than later after they have been released as a beta.

THIS is a really good news ;)

Firstly they had to develop bunch of technologies, now they will (hopely) integrate them. Google Bookmarks + starring in Reader should be the first. :)

I think they got started.

Unification of UI is going pretty well.

Page Creators elements just got integrated into Groups.

Yay Google

"The initiative's primary goal is to make Google products easier to use, especially by packaging disparate products. For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

I thought Calendar was being integrated into Gmail.

Yeah, I hope they finally improve Google Analytics usability, make Google Calendar and Google Maps load faster, update their API program, stuff like that that's really needed. Then again, I also like to see them release new stuff :)

i agree with TOMHTML, its really good news because now we can surely keep in mind that googlers will have to improve existing services (gmail, calendar, "to-do list", gtalk, analytics, etc)! yahoooo! .... oops =D

This is funny. It immediately reminded me of a quote in an article on digg's frontpage from earlier today: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2006/tc20061004_441574.htm

A Gaggle of Google Wannabes:

"Google's strategy has shifted from trying to get you to information on the Web to trying to capture more and more of your time," says Doug Leeds, Ask.com vice-president for product management. "We are focused solely on getting people to their information faster."

Looks like Google has discovered this on their own as well.

"For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

But repeat after me: Google is not interested in an office suite.

But this isn't an office suite, it's a "complement" to Desktop versions ;)

It´s not Office Suite, it´s Web-based Applications Suite. Google is not portal. It´s just a search engine which mission is to organize all information and make them universally accesible. :-)

Maybe NOW they will have time to work on Google Freedom?

That of course would be the smart browser add-on which would try many, many methods to route search and web traffic for sites and words banned in China. It would update itself frequently to add new methods as the dictators discover and block existing methods. Google would determine all sites which are blocked in any way (including those Google censors) and create temporary mirrors of the content, encrypt the content, and transfer the content. Thus, search for "human rights in China", and the famously banned hric.org would be mirrored to a randomly-created IP address, and delivered in encrypted form to the end user in China or elsewhere.

A team of Google engineers would invest at least 10% of gross revenue from Google.cn operations into this research and development.

Is there any project with a higher priority than freedom? A billion Chinese are hoping Google answers correctly!