Do you remember the Google Nexus Q? We present this and 43 other Google flops in the gallery of the biggest Google flops.
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We present the biggest Google flops. And show the laboratory in which some of these flops, but also some ingenious direct hits, were created.
© istockphoto.com/GiorgioMagini
Google Nexus Q: Introduced 12 years ago
According to The Verge, Google discontinued the Nexus Q presented in 2012 before it went on sale. The $299 Nexus Q was supposed to be a “social streaming device”. It was ultimately a small computer with the Android operating system that should be able to play music and videos from the cloud. The first reviews in the USA were rather negative. Google reacted and initially postponed the market launch. At the end of 2012, the Nexus X disappeared from the Google website.
This Youtube video introduces the Google Nexus Q.
Hangouts: In November 2022, Google will pull the plug
Google will shut down Google Hangouts in November 2022. As of July 2022, Google will start migrating Hangouts users to Google Chat, Google announced in a blog post.
Gallery: The 44 biggest Google flops
Brilliant achievements…
Some products from Google, which has been called Alphabet since August 2015, are ingenious and immediately find many enthusiastic users. Google Maps with Street View. Or Google Docs and Spreadsheets. And of course, and most importantly, web searches fall into this category. Android and the Google Chrome browser are also absolute success models.
…time to mature…
Other projects like Keep, which is called Google Notes in Germany, are taking some time to mature. There is also an app for Google Notes. The Nexus smartphones, on the other hand, were not a complete failure, but they have not gained any relevant shares in the smartphone market to date. These Android smartphones, which Google has produced by changing hardware partners, were previously more of a kind of toy for technology lovers, as a Huawei manager described it a long time ago. The Pixel smartphones released in 2016 have not changed that.
…and failures
The takeover of the traditional company Motorola in 2012 was not very successful for Google. In 2014, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. The Chinese buried the renowned mobile phone brand in early 2016. But a few other projects and offers also failed completely. The Chrome apps, for example, have hardly found any users, as has Google App Maker. To date, Project Ara has not resulted in a single ready-made smartphone that you can buy. The comparison service Google Compare was not even able to establish itself in the USA.
Sometimes Google also discontinues services that were by no means a letdown. Like Google Reader. When Google announced that it wanted to discontinue this RSS service, a storm of protest went through the web. But without success. As part of its “cleaning campaigns”, Google repeatedly discontinues services and programs that are less in demand in order to free up resources for new projects. Likewise, in March 2017, Google is retiring the Google Now Launcher. And at the end of 2020, Google Cloud Print will be closed, which was also not a flop in the strict sense.
Not every discontinued Google product was actually a flop. Sometimes Google even competed with itself by releasing two similar products. Picasa, which wasn’t really a flop but got in-house competition from Google Photos, and Panoramio also fall into this category, as do Hangouts on Air and My Tracks. Then, after some time, Google pulls the ripcord and discontinues one of the duplicate products. Google also discontinued the Reply smart answer tool in October 2018, but this function is incorporated into Gmail Smart Compose and Smart Reply. And Youtube Music replaced Google Play Music in 2020.
This also applies to the competing projects with drones – one of these drone projects “crashed” miserably in January 2017. Google Talk finally met its fate on June 26, 2017: Google shut down the chat service and migrated all remaining users to Hangouts. But Google also wants to stop Hangouts seems to only be allowed to continue for corporate customers.
Most of the Google flop offers compiled here have already been discontinued, but a few are still available. Still others have a long stalemate behind them, such as Google+. First, Google ended the compulsory binding of a Gmail account to a Google+ profile. In November 2015, Google then moved to target themed communities via Google Plus. But this reorientation was also in vain, Google announced on October 9th, 2018 that it will discontinue Google+ for private users. There was still a gallows deadline for Google+ until August 2019.
We have not included the Android apps Bump and Flock in our gallery. These projects did not actually fail, but were discontinued due to strategic considerations. Likewise, we waived the ideas of Google services such as the package storage service Bufferbox, which only existed in the USA. And the discontinued Quickoffice for Android and iOS is not a flop – on the contrary, the office suite was extremely successful. Only Google bought them up and incorporated their functions into its own office suite.