Google has announced today that it will discontinue many of its older products. Ever since co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO last april, the company has looked to shave excess weight by discontinuing products are out of date or just unpopular. Headlining today’s closures was the Google Mini enterprise search appliance. The Mini, which is a smaller box version of its larger cousin, the search enterprise, was designed for customers rather than big business enterprises. Matt Eichner, General Manager of Global Enterprise Search, said in a blog post that the Mini would be replaced by the Search Appliance and cloud-hosted applications such as Site Search and Commerce Search. The Mini will officially be discontinued on July 31st.
Google Talk Chatback, which allowed publishers to add a GTalk widget on their website so they could communicate with visitors, is also getting killed. Publishers can use the Meebo bar instead. Google Video, which hasn’t allowed new uploads since mid-2009, will have its remaining videos transferred to Youtube and users will have until August 20th to delete, transfer, or download their content.
Finally, Google is also giving iGoogle, a personalized home page portal, the ax as the evolution of apps that can run on Android and Chrome has gotten rid of the need for a portal such as iGoogle. Users will have until Nov 1. 2013 to collect their data before the site will be closed. On another note, Google will also get rid of its Symbian search app and will instead focus on mobile web search via Google.com. What do you think of Google’s Spring cleaning? Is there anything that they missed? Is there anything that you would’ve saved? Let us know in the comments section below.
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