The idea is to collate as many shuttered Google services/products as possible, and still live services/products, with their start and end dates. I’m also collecting a few covariates: number of Google hits, type (program/service/physical object/other), and maybe Alexa rank of the home page & whether source code was released.
This turns out to be much more difficult than it looks because many shut downs are not prominently advertised, and many start dates are lost to our ongoing digital dark age (for example, when did the famous & popular Google Translate open? After an hour applying my excellent research skills, #lesswrong’s and no less than 5 people on Google+’s help, the best we can say is that it opened some time between 02 and 08 March 2001). Regardless, I’m up to 274 entries.
The idea is to graph the data, look for trends, and do a survival analysis with the covariates to extrapolate how much longer random Google things have to live.
Does anyone have suggestions as to additional predictive variables which could be found with a reasonable amount of effort for >274 Google things?
Do you have registered user numbers for those services where this is meaningful?
Hm, no. I figured that I would be able to get such numbers for a handful of services at best, and it wasn’t worth the effort. (I mean, Google didn’t even release user count for Reader as far as I know. So I’d be able to get random user counts for like YouTube and Gmail and that’s it. If even those.)
Might the possibility of registering be an interesting variable? Or the possibility of paying money for the service?
Confession: I’m interested in this type of study because the second article I referenced mentioned that Google Voice seemed on a doomed trajectory, and I use Google Voice all the time.
I appreciate—I suspected as much based on the Slate article. Even before reading it, I was constantly surprised that Google hadn’t announced Voice would cost money. And Voice is hardly central to Google’s apparent mission, the way you correctly note Calendar seems central.
I’m trying to estimate how much longer it will last—i.e. when I should start looking for a different service. Given the low likelihood of five-year survival, and that the product is about five years old, I should probably get a move on it.
Ah, that’s a good suggestion: ‘is someone paying Google for this?’ This subsumes the advertising covariate I was musing about (I didn’t bring it up because looking at a bunch of the dead services, I didn’t know how I could possibly check whether advertising was involved). I’ll add that.
And yes, I would be worried about Voice’s long-term prospects, but my impression is that it won’t be going away within the next 5 years, say. They’ve sunsetted the Blackberry app, and neglected the service, but that still leaves the main service and 3 other apps/services according to my current list.
At this point I’m up to 123, so I’m not really keen on going back and recoding all of them; it’s a lot of work, and the profit variable is already a decent predictor.
I’m working on an analysis of Google services/products shutdown, inspired by http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/22/google-keep-services-closed
The idea is to collate as many shuttered Google services/products as possible, and still live services/products, with their start and end dates. I’m also collecting a few covariates: number of Google hits, type (program/service/physical object/other), and maybe Alexa rank of the home page & whether source code was released.
This turns out to be much more difficult than it looks because many shut downs are not prominently advertised, and many start dates are lost to our ongoing digital dark age (for example, when did the famous & popular Google Translate open? After an hour applying my excellent research skills, #lesswrong’s and no less than 5 people on Google+’s help, the best we can say is that it opened some time between 02 and 08 March 2001). Regardless, I’m up to 274 entries.
The idea is to graph the data, look for trends, and do a survival analysis with the covariates to extrapolate how much longer random Google things have to live.
Does anyone have suggestions as to additional predictive variables which could be found with a reasonable amount of effort for >274 Google things?
Do you have registered user numbers for those services where this is meaningful?
Also, I assume you’ve see this and this, but just in case you hadn’t . . .
Hm, no. I figured that I would be able to get such numbers for a handful of services at best, and it wasn’t worth the effort. (I mean, Google didn’t even release user count for Reader as far as I know. So I’d be able to get random user counts for like YouTube and Gmail and that’s it. If even those.)
Yeah, I’ve seen those.
Might the possibility of registering be an interesting variable? Or the possibility of paying money for the service?
Confession: I’m interested in this type of study because the second article I referenced mentioned that Google Voice seemed on a doomed trajectory, and I use Google Voice all the time.
Update: I’ve finished, and I’m afraid it doesn’t look good for Voice.
I appreciate—I suspected as much based on the Slate article. Even before reading it, I was constantly surprised that Google hadn’t announced Voice would cost money. And Voice is hardly central to Google’s apparent mission, the way you correctly note Calendar seems central.
I’m trying to estimate how much longer it will last—i.e. when I should start looking for a different service. Given the low likelihood of five-year survival, and that the product is about five years old, I should probably get a move on it.
Ah, that’s a good suggestion: ‘is someone paying Google for this?’ This subsumes the advertising covariate I was musing about (I didn’t bring it up because looking at a bunch of the dead services, I didn’t know how I could possibly check whether advertising was involved). I’ll add that.
And yes, I would be worried about Voice’s long-term prospects, but my impression is that it won’t be going away within the next 5 years, say. They’ve sunsetted the Blackberry app, and neglected the service, but that still leaves the main service and 3 other apps/services according to my current list.
You might want to distinguish between free, freemium (like Google Drive, with a free intro tier), and paid.
At this point I’m up to 123, so I’m not really keen on going back and recoding all of them; it’s a lot of work, and the profit variable is already a decent predictor.