Saturday, October 9, 2010

Official Google Blog: Goodbye to an old friend: 1-800-GOOG-411

Google will shut down its speech reco application GOOG 411. I had written about this service before. I don't have a smartphone, and this was a handy service when you were away from your computer. Google rarely hesitates to pull the plug on a service that isn't meeting expectations, so I guess this is no exception. Thanks to Phillip Hunter for alerting me to this story.

1 comment:

Dandy said...

And yet another great service is going to shut down, because of lousy marketing department in Google! The big problem with Google is that they don't know how to market their great technologies and make money out of them. In this case their objection is that since they developed native apps for smartphones they don't see any advantage in Goog-411 and therefore they won’t continue the service. I guess they should look into numbers, even in US the majority of people still use regular phones rather than Smart phones. So this is not a good excuse to abandon this great service.
Whit this attitude, Google is going to lose its customers, especially now that they step into Enterprise with their Google Apps. With this attitude, there is no guaranty for businesses to switch to Google and layout their needs on Google Services, because Google might withdraw those services with or without any reasons. i.e. Just in May, 2010 @Google IO they announced that they are opening Google Waves for Apps' users and couple months later they retired Wave! It's hard to trust on experimental technologies, and that is why Google hasn't been able to make money on most of its products except the search.
Google! Please change this attitude!