Another Round Of Google Shutdowns: Google Apps For Teams, Google Listen & Google Video For Business
Google just announced yet another batch of services it plans to discontinue in the near future. Most of these are relatively obscure products that probably didn't have a large amount of traction.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third documented wave of Google product culls in the corpus. The first came in January 2009, when Google ended video uploads and shuttered Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball and Jaiku (the 2009 shutdown round); the second arrived in November 2011 with plans to kill Knol, Friend Connect and Wave (the Knol/Wave batch), followed by a May 2011 list of APIs scheduled for termination (the API shutdown schedule).
The August 2012 batch — Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen, and Google Video for Business — is smaller-stakes than Wave or Knol, and TechCrunch notes most of the targets had little traction. What makes it notable is cadence rather than scale: the announcement traveled across eight outlets on day one, from The Official Google Blog to The Verge and AllThingsD, signaling that 'another round of shutdowns' has become an expected genre of Google news.
First-order effects
- Users of the three services must migrate off them; Google Apps for Teams and Google Video for Business sit inside the paid Google Apps ecosystem, so business customers lose bundled features they may have provisioned around.
- Google frees engineering resources from three low-traction products, consistent with the stated rationale of concentrating effort where usage justifies it.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in the affected niches — podcast catch-up apps like the space Google Listen occupied, and business video hosting vendors competing with Video for Business — inherit churned users looking for replacements.
- IT buyers evaluating Google Apps now price in a track record of feature removal, which strengthens the hand of Microsoft and other office-suite competitors selling continuity guarantees.
Third-order effects
- If the roughly annual pruning rhythm holds — 2009, 2011, 2012 — developers and businesses will treat any non-core Google product as carrying built-in mortality risk, shifting integration decisions toward products Google signals are strategic.
- The practice normalizes shutdown announcements as routine portfolio hygiene at large platform companies, making deprecation notice quality and migration paths a competitive differentiator in their own right.
The trend: Google is institutionalizing periodic culling of low-traction products, turning 'will this service survive' into a standard risk factor for anyone building on its platform.