Google cleans house: iGoogle, Google Mini being shuttered
Just a few days after the end of I/O, Google is already on the warpath and shuttering aging products left and right.
A few of the latest products that the Mountain View, Calif.-based corporation is cancelling might sound familiar -- if not a bit stale by now.
Widget board iGoogle is just one example of a platform that made a lot of sense back in 2008. But with the ability to add apps to your browser on Chrome and Android, this one just looks so dated already. Not to mention you can configure your Google+ page to perform a lot of the same news and updates activities as well.
However, iGoogle fans have all the way until November 1, 2013 to still use this product.
On the business customer side, enterprise search service Google Mini is also on the way out as Google ramps up support for Google Search Appliance, Google Site Search and Google Commerce Search. Nevertheless, Google is promising to continue providing technical support to existing Mini customers through the end of their contracts.
Matt Eichner, general manager of Google's Global Enterprise Search unit, explained on the official Google blog on Tuesday that these products are going the way of the Dodo to streamline some of Google's other services. "Closing products always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users," Eichner noted.
A full list of the latest targets are available on the Google blog now.
Google has been in a spring cleaning mood for much longer than just a season -- especially since Larry Page took the reins as CEO last year. Page has made it clear that he wants the company to focus more on long haul projects focused on social and mobile -- so basically Android, Chrome and Google+, which were the three biggest themes of the Internet giant's conference in San Francisco last week.
Of course, Google did clean house a bit amid April showers as well. Earlier this year, the Goog published another list of services going defunct, most of which centered around Picasa and various mobile apps.