Google is ending some products and reallocating their resources to other projects – like Google+
More products are being retired by Google, with another three announced today in a blog post. The company has disclosed that Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen and Google Video for Business will join the other 50 products this year that have been axed.
Google Apps for Teams was simply to allow collaboration between teams with Google Docs, Calendar and Talk (the non-core items of Apps) – but “we realised that Google Apps for Teams was not as useful for people as we originally thought”. Accounts will be converted to personal Google Accounts, and this does not have any impact with any other Google Apps services.
Google Listen, if you haven’t heard of it – me neither – was a Google Labs project to let users discover and listen to podcasts. However, because Google Play has many podcasting apps, and people can also listen to the MP3 file directly from their phone, it is no longer necessary. From November 1, the podcast search function will no longer work, and users can transfer their podcast subscriptions from Google Reader under “Listen Subscriptions”.
Google Video for Business was the business-version of Google Video – which was previously announced to close on August 20. It’s main focus was to have video storage for corporate internal communications. Now, all of that will be integrated in Google Drive. Migrated videos will not count towards the storage quota, Google confirmed.
Unlike the controversial iGoogle closing, these services are no longer used, or their features have been duplicated with more recent Google products, so it makes sense for them to shut these services down and reallocate the resources to maintaining it to some other project – most likely on Google+.