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Google needs a more formalized way to kill products

Abner Li | Apr 30 2024 - 2:10 pm PT

Google should standardize when it kills products and major features instead of doing it sporadically throughout the year. The current approach, especially for the average user, is too hard to keep track of, and contributes to the perceived — deserved or not — sense of impending doom with Google services.

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One anecdote I’ve heard lately is a person hearing that a product is being killed and then wondering whether an entirely separate Google service they use is going to have the same outcome.

What I have in mind is a return to the concept of “spring cleaning” that Google had from 2011 to around 2013. All product deprecations for the year/cycle should be announced, for example, in April and be finalized before year’s end.

This announcement formalization, if not centralization, could cut down on some people’s fears that the products they use could be on the chopping block at any time by giving them a set moment to look out for. People hate surprises after all. Meanwhile, an end of year deadline would make sure they don’t drag out to the point that people forgot something was shutting down.

The counter argument is that it could look like Google is killing all the things, but I’d argue it’s akin to ripping the band-aid right off instead of having a drip of bad news.

The other thing Google needs to do a better job with is the state of the succeeding product. There should be an objective review and feedback process to determine whether the replacement does the job of the original. When the answer is no, the trust people have for Google is damaged.

Looking back at the old spring cleaning blog posts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], I’m struck by how Google broadly justified wind downs several years ago. Google does that today, but it’s usually product-specific.

The old announcements framed deprecations within a broader company-wide context that might be worth revisiting, especially since more parts of the company are now centralized under a handful of leaders:

“This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people.”
“We’ve never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won’t change. We’ll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential. But by targeting our resources more effectively, we can focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience.”
“We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on.”
“Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past… Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.”
“… we’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward. Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience.”
“Focus is crucial if we are to improve our execution. We have so many opportunities in front of us that without hard choices we risk doing too much and not having the impact we strive for.”
“Making changes to products or services is hard, but we do need to maintain our focus if we are to do important things that matter in the world. As we continue our clean-up, we look forward to creating a simpler, more beautiful user experience across Google.”