Google Shutting Down Projects

An interesting story… even Google seems to be pulling back in this troubled economy. Search Engine Land is reporting the shutdown of new development on a number of projects, and Google themselves have acknowledged the shutdown of Google Video, Catalog Search, Notebook, Jaiku, and Dodgeball.

All of these cutbacks were reportedly based on a lack of revenue, which makes sense. But one does have to wonder why a serious effort was never made to let Jaiku compete in the growing micro-blogging market? While Twitter may have been an impossible chase, the association of the Google name should have been worth something. And if it wasn’t, the original acquisition would seem to be a poor business decision. Bad economy, or no bad economy.

Comments

  1. Steve – one word on Google Notebook – Evernote

  2. Agreed. Seems that Google doesn’t want to compete unless it can be the market leader. Or in the case of Google Video, internal redundancy… once youtube was acquired.

  3. Well, Evernote, sure. But Notebook integrated nicely with the rest of Google. And they’d just gone to the trouble of pushing their Bookmarks (which I use and prefer to Delicious) into Notebook. At least Bookmarks will survive.