...as Google goes into the grim economic times predicted for 2009
Note: predicted. Zappos did the same thing - they laid off people in advance because they expected things to get worse - and they even said that laying off the people cost them more money in severance that it saved in the first year.
Is this becoming a self fulfilling prophecy?
Are we predicting a downturn to the point that we are causing one?
Possibly, but all of the services Google cut were due to mistakes made in the past couple years.
I think the more likely explanation is that companies are using this "downturn" as an excuse to cut the crud without the bad publicity. The effect of this, more than likely, is that the downturn looks worse than it actually is.
While it's sad to see these products close, this strikes me as a long-overdue sign that Google does in fact follow the same laws of physics as everyone else.
Am I the only one who liked Google Notebook? With the Firefox addon it was a quick and easy way to make notes without having to have an external source of note taking.
Thanks, for some reason I can never remember that Lifehacker exists. Would save me a lot of time looking at stuff like this.
Edit: Unfortunately it looks like Evernote is less focused on text only notes, which make up a majority of my notes. The thumbnails are less useful than the first couple lines that Google Notebook shows. Plus, you have to explicitly click on the Edit button to change a note, which just seems like an extra step for no reason.
Picasa and Blogger haven't been total failures. Urchin has spawned the very widely used Google Analytics. Writely became Google Docs. Postini still operates and has significantly lower fees now.
Google does have a pretty bad history with some acquisitions, but some have worked.
Note: predicted. Zappos did the same thing - they laid off people in advance because they expected things to get worse - and they even said that laying off the people cost them more money in severance that it saved in the first year.
Is this becoming a self fulfilling prophecy?
Are we predicting a downturn to the point that we are causing one?