How Google Dumps Its Losers
By Anna Johnson on February 18th, 2009If you’ve ever wondered what to do about your ‘loser’ products or services – those products or services you put so much time, effort and resources into, but that haven’t paid off – you might be interested to know how Google deals with its losers.
Over the past few months Google has dumped a number of projects including its virtual world, Lively, a cellphone service called Dodgeball, a scanned paper product catalog search tool called Catalog Search, and a tool that allowed people to take notes while they searched called Notebook. Google also pulled its newspaper and radio ad placement services.
So what is the point at which Google says ‘enough is enough’?
Well, according to Google’s senior vice president of engineering, Jeff Huber, there is no single equation Google uses to determine when to pull the plug. It does, however, look at all the data it has available. For example, Google will look at the audience achieved for a given product and see whether or not it is growing.
Google also considers several criteria when considering whether or not to continue supporting the development of a particular product or service.
In addition to the popularity of the given product, Google looks at whether the product is popular internally (e.g. does anyone want to work on it?), whether it solves a big enough problem, and the degree to which it has achieved internal performance targets.
You might apply similar criteria to your own projects. We certainly are doing so, and, in fact, plan to rationalize some of our web properties over the coming months.
Source: Vindu Goel, “How Google Decides to Pull the Plug,” The New York Times, February 14, 2009
