The Killed By Google site includes a record of 259 services that The tech giant has mowed down or will terminate by the end of this year or in the year following, respectively. G-Suite (old free version), Chrome applications, Google OnHub, YouTube Originals, as well as Google Currents are among the five services that Google plans to discontinue relatively soon.
The services that Google is intending to discontinue include those already listed, as well as a plethora of others. The fact that Google can manage to try out a broad range of services implies that most of them will be a failure. It’s possible you’ve never heard of the following services, yet their demise was met with some controversy.
1. YouTube Messages
Messages were launched in 2017 and taken off in 2018 by YouTube. One-on-one or group chats were possible instead of using the public comment area of videos for this private messaging service. Sharing clips with other users was at the heart of what the service did. According to TechCrunch, there were a few speculations as to why the functionality was eliminated. Perhaps one of the chief factors for discontinuance was under-utilization. Because the company already has a slew of messaging applications, there’s no need for another.
We may, nonetheless, deduce the most major rationale for Google’s decision to discontinue the messaging services from the innumerable furious and poorly-written remarks on the company’s help website. This feature was a big hit with the younger generation, according to the poll results. My definition of “young people” includes children. Apparently, minors may exploit this tool to obtain clips that YouTube will otherwise restrict them from seeing. Anyone might communicate a link with them through YouTube Messages and immediately obtain access, which was undoubtedly another scandal YouTube was looking to dodge.
2. YouTube Community Contributions
On September 28, 2020, the platform formally discontinued support for this service. Using Community Contributions, anyone out there could add subtitles or interpretations to any clip available on the service. Deaf YouTubers and audiences slammed the decision instead of youngsters who expressed outrage about the cessation of direct texting.
It was in May that Deaf YouTuber Rikki Poynter noted on her channel that communal subtitles were an accessible resource for artists who couldn’t afford the expense of paying for their work to have subtitles provided for the hearing-impaired audience as well. It was also stated that Community Contributions enabled participants to transcribe videos into different tongues, allowing them to attract a larger readership.
Despite the outcry, several YouTube creators backed the platform’s choice by disclosing how many people were submitting vitriolic remarks to YouTube videos, which the tech giant emphasized in their public help page confirming the closure of the function. However, the page no longer shows the change because it was made 2 years ago.
In the end, Google is a for-profit company. You can bet the corporation is going to stop providing it if its earnings are low. Google is among the world’s largest corporations, and its workforce is too enormous for a single staff to handle. In order to keep things reasonable, it has been broken up into a number of smaller, more focused groups. As a result of the difficulties teams face in communicating, different app concepts may be tried out by separate groups. Apps like Google+ and Inbox are simply a few examples of these unsuccessful initiatives.
