Google have announced today that they will discontinue two underperforming products; Google Health and Google PowerMeter. Google Health will retire on January 1st, 2012, while Google PowerMeter will retire this September 16th.
Google Health
Launched in May 2008, Google Health is a service that allows users to store, manage and share their health information from one central place. Google PowerMeter was first launched in February 2009 and allows users to monitor their home’s energy consumption from anywhere online. Data from Google PowerMeter will be available for export until the service shuts down in September, while Google Health data will be made available for export until January 2013.
Aaron Brown, senior product manager at Google Health commented on the closure of the service,
“Now, with a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users…but we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.”
Ultimately, Google attribute the discontinuation of both services on their “inability to scale” which has led the company to focus priorities elsewhere. Google’s decisiveness in killing off products and services early that do not perform to expectation is undoubtedly part of their success. Both services now join Google Video and Google Wave, among others, in the ever-growing Google graveyard.
