A couple of days ago on Habré published the publication " Big Brother will give you a hand ", which, in fact, was another letter of happiness from a fan. Since I am not a fan of Google (I just love some of its products), I have long been tormented by the question: are the corporation's products so successful?

Let's try to get away from his star search, super-friendly mail, the most profitable advertising network, and take a look at other, not so successful projects.

dodgeball

I learned about this service from the news me + alex quit google. (dodgeball forever !!!!) ”, which was accompanied by a very characteristic photograph:
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The creators of dodgeball are fed up with the fact that in the 2 years that have passed since the acquisition of a startup by Google, no attention has been paid to the service.

Google base

An ambitious idea is to create a completely new information unit on the Internet - a record in a centralized database from Google. And at the same time, technically beautiful - the record may consist of a completely arbitrary set of fields of the most diverse format. The base was predicted to become a substitute for a wide variety of sites - from numerous dating services to oldies like Craigslist and eBay. The creators have forgotten wisdom: a beautiful idea is not enough, you need to put a soul into it, or at least pay attention to the fray. So now Google Base is just another lifeless aggregator of heaps of heaps of commercial sites.

Opensocial

Google is trying to dictate fashion, not being the industry leader: it owns a social network that is popular in rather exotic countries (Brazil and India). The question from the owners of top networks is quite logical: “Should we use the buggy API of someone else’s developer in our service?”

Blogger

Apparently, the scheme “buy a startup → integrate into Google Account → hammer on a service for two or three years → start working on it” is popular in the Corporation. And the Blogger is no exception: in the first few years of the service existence under the wing of Google, users constantly complained about various bugs, instability of hosting, that developers do not add modern features. Fortunately, the business has shifted from the dead point, but before that I often ran into dead blogs, whose authors left an ad “read me in my new standalone blog."

At the same time, Blogger has always been and is an exceptionally attractive hosting for spam blogs, and the logic is iron: if on some small blog hosting the number of splogs will be the main share of all blogs of this service, then Google thinks about the service which doesn’t deserve trust. His service, Google seems to give unlimited credit of trust.

Google earth

Creators of this program have forgotten that users terribly do not like to install software and prefer web applications. The claim to the standard in the field of browsing various cards did not fire, it’s trite to share a card — insert it into a blog, send a link to a friend (a friend simply cannot open it without a program);

Google video

The service is social, inconvenient, buggy. Google frankly acknowledged the failure of its offspring by acquiring Youtube.

Froogle

To give the system under the content of a commercially interested party (store sellers) is not the best idea, especially in an era of universal sociality. I don’t know how it is now, but earlier the mainstream traffic in the system was received by unscrupulous sellers who publish under-priced products in the system.

Of course, Google is a powerful innovative company that revolutionized the search, popularized AJAX, set the tone for using web applications, made free what they used to take money for (satellite maps), what was not available on the Web at all (electronic copies books, including rare ones). However, to paraphrase the words of one of the angry employees of Google , let's stop thinking about Google as King Midas: not all services performed in the famous blue and white interface are golden!