Google Flops

Google is one of the most celebrated names in the world of computers and Internet. Its products always remain on the cynosure of all eyes. Armed with a plethora of epoch-making inventions apart from its flagship search engine, today the company has truly been the one-stop solution provider to the netizens.

Google Flops & Failures

However, Google’s path of glory has not been without failures. On the contrary, there are a lot of Google products that have been a complete fiasco. Let’s take a long walk to Google’s graveyard to learn more on where they faltered:

Google Buzz: This was introduced to counter the popularity of Facebook and Twitter. However, this opt-out service for Gmail users is a complete failure and has not augured the expected fan following from the Gmail users.

Google X: It was the Google search engine’s home page version that was framed akin to Mac OS UI. It was meant to display all of Google’s products in a row of icons as appearing above the search bar. The project was called off immediately lasting only for a day.

Google+: G+, as this service better known as, zoomed to possess fastest 10,000,000 members under its belt. However, since then its popularity has declined subsequently along with a massive downfall in traffic.

Google Answers: This was projected as an ill-fitting reply to Yahoo Answers. It engaged paid researchers to answer the queries of the users, who were asked to bid for a reply. However it is presumed that the users wanted their replies for free, although quality comes with price.

Orkut: It is a much hyped social networking site launched by Google to curb down the domination of Facebook. However, only in India and Brazil Orkut received some sort of popularity, which was soon faded out to give way to Facebook.

Google Wave: It was launched with a perspective to bring all the features of social media and instant messaging and combine them into the old-fashioned email service. No matter how novel the initiative was, the users showed no interest to ride the tide as they found it overly complicated.

Google Audio Ads: This was a radio powered audio advertising platform meant to provide search based ads to the global broadcasters. However, the real performance of the service was far behind the expected levels and Google finally left behind Audio Ads in 2009.

Google Notebook: It was a browser based application launched by Google to enable the netizen to save any information available over the Internet to a personal notebook. However, this service soon went into the oblivion with the introduction of Google Drive.

Dodgeball: Google purchased this location-based social networking service for mobile devices from its founder who ultimately left Google to form Foursquare. Soon Dodgeball lost in the race of being the premier mobile-based space. Understanding this, Google buried Dodgeball and moved on to introduce Google Latitude.

Apart from these, there are also some little known Google products that cannot be termed as flops right away, and therefore are not included in this discourse. To know more about these, click on the above link. Feel free to share your thoughts.

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Tagged: Google disasters, Google failures, Google flops, Google product failures