According to Google's Code Blog, Google will be killing off Dodgeball.com,its social networking service whose gimmick was that you could share your location with friends... yawn, and Jaiku, a microblogging service that will now be open-source.
On Google's Inside Google Book Search blog, we learn that they're 86ing Catalog Search, which was an early attempt at OCR technology.
On Google's Notebook blog, they're putting a stake in the heart of Notebook (although saving existing documents... better start archiving, folks!). IMO, Google simply got out-developed by other web-based collaboration tools; Zoho's my current fave, but they're a dime a dozen these days.
And finally, on Google's Video Blog, we learn that they will stop supporting uploads of user-generated content, although they will continue to index video content on the web.
None of these are particularly surprising; they're all aspects of Google's services/products that don't offer obvious, unique value, and Google is learning that just slapping "Google" on a product name doesn't guarantee that it will become the default tool.
And, random thought here... this is why Microsoft can still maintain its vast market share for software apps - right now, it's difficult for people to learn a new operating system or software application (word processing, calendar, etc), so whatever's shipped with your PC is what you use. Any application that is entirely web-based, like virtually all of Google's apps, are not yet so firmly entrenched in people's minds or PCs that they can't switch easily. Google gained market share when it first launched its search engine because it stood out -- it was clean, simple and worked far better than its competitors. No learning curve required. Everyone moved over to the easiest, best option and stayed.
Desktop apps, on the other hand, can't be as simple as a Google search box. They have to be complex or they wouldn't provide the power that people need for their basic office functions. And that means that people are far less likely to switch from one office app to another without a very compelling reason. As soon as Google moved out of the white-screen-with-search-box mode to offering relatively more complex tools such as Google Documents, it found itself in an entirely different competitive environment.
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