The fact that GMail and Google Maps are still existent technologies is a somewhat surprising thing given Google’s propensity to kill products. Google’s Wave (lifespan: May 2009 to approximately August 2010) and Buzz (February 2010 to approximately December 2011) barely got off the ground before they were terminated, with bits and pieces of those technologies merging into other projects. Not many people lamented the end of those projects, as they never really had much of a user base. But Google has killed off relatively popular services like Orkut (2004-2014) Google Reader (2005-2013), and iGoogle (2005-2013).
Other platforms, like Google Talk / Google Chat, get shoehorned into newer projects such as Google Hangouts. (The url https://www.google.com/talk gets redirected to https://www.google.com/hangouts, for example.) And Google’s quixotic attempt at establishing a social networking platform (Google+), is now being split into two services, Photos and Streams. Not that this latest rearranging of the deck chairs really matters, since, I mean, c’mon: almost no one uses Google+ even though it’s very pretty and its features were really compelling.
This constant churn makes things difficult for businesses looking to establish long-term stability on a suite of products that can be relied on for the foreseeable future. One could be forgiven for thinking that ChromeOS will be next, especially since Microsoft is giving away licenses for certain form-factors for essentially nothing?
Microsoft, for what it’s worth, is not immune to this concern. A few years ago, there was a piece of software that showed a lot of promise: Live Mesh. It was a little clunky, and it was a little unreliable, but the concept was great. You could designate certain folders on your various devices, and the contents in those folders would be synchronized across the devices. I think it used SkyDrive as the backbone, but it didn’t necessarily require that things be stored on SkyDrive. Live Mesh is dead, though.
Admittedly, distributed synchronization is less efficient than a centralized repository and it makes sense that a free tool would be deprecated or discontinued by the provider of the free tool. But for those of us who have real qualms (or outright prohibitions) about storing sensitive documents on a third-party’s website, a centralized host like OneDrive just isn’t a viable solution for data synchronization. Which is why, in the future, I’ll be talking about personal cloud offerings.
