Almost a month after shutting down services such as iGoogle, and Google Video, Google is back with another round of product killing. The company has announced the news via a post on its official blog, saying it is going to shut down three more of its web and mobile products – Listen, Google Apps for Teams and Google Video for Business.
Google had introduced Listen, the podcast app, in 2009. The app allowed users to jam podcasts with an official Google-branded product. Venturebeat in its report says the timing of the move is ‘funny’ as Apple recently released its own standalone podcast app in June. The report further speculates Google could add some podcast features to its Google Music app in near future.
“With Google Play, people now have access to a wider variety of podcast apps, so we’ve discontinued Listen,” read the Google blog post. “People who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1, podcast search won’t function.”
Google Apps for Teams was launched in 2008. It allowed businesses to use all the Google tools without requiring to sign up for a Google e-mail address. Moreover, Google is shutting down Google Video for Business. Videos previously hosted using the service now will be shifted to a user’s Google drive. To compensate, Google will not be counting these videos in the allotted storage quota on the cloud storage service.
“Technology has the power to change people’s lives. But to make a difference, we need to carefully consider what to focus on, and make hard decisions about what we won’t pursue,” said the post. “This enables us to devote more time and resources giving you products you love, and making them better for you.”
Google has also decided to shut down some of its blogs, which are either updated infrequently or redundant with other blogs. “Finally, Google maintains 150 blogs and other communications channels about our products and services, and so over time we’ll also be closing a number of Google-created blogs that are either updated infrequently, or are redundant with other blogs. This doesn’t mean that we’ll be sharing any less information—we’ll just be posting our updates on our more popular channels,” concluded the blog post.
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