This past Friday, with the weekend upon us and everyone preoccupied with events in New York and with looming anti-trust investigations involving Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), the search giant chose to quietly pull the plug on two of its projects that were once considered ambitious and game-changing.
In a blog post, Google declared both Google Health and Google PowerMeter officially dead.
As one would expect, the official reason is that both services did not see the expected level of adoption that would have made them viable long-term projects. Blog co-authors Google Health senior product manager Aaron Brown and Google green energy czar Bill Weihl described the situation as follows:
Both [projects] were based on the idea that with more and better information, people can make smarter choices, whether in regard to managing personal health and wellness, or saving money and conserving energy at home. While they didn't scale as we had hoped, we believe they did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult.
So if you are one of those who have been using any one of these two Google products, you have until January 1, 2013, and September 16, 2011, to remove your data from Google Health and Google PowerMeter, respectively.
I find it difficult to understand the wisdom behind this decision, particularly at a time when the healthcare and energy sectors are going through such massive transformations. However, saying that both projects were discontinued because they got very little traction is as lame as me saying that I failed my exams because I didn’t find enough time to study. Who was supposed to generate traction for these projects? With the passing of the Healthcare Bill and the move toward electronic medical Records (EMR), one would have hope that the time for Google Health to flourish has come.
This was certainly not the planned outcome of the grandiose picture Google presented to us three years ago when it launched these two projects. Google’s VP of search and user products Marissa Mayer wrote at the time of the Google Health launch about the great benefits of the new service. As we do with all Google products, we were quick out of the blocks to hail the services as revolutionary and game-changing.
However, some experts pointed out from the onset that Google didn’t give these two projects the support they needed to succeed. On Google Health, Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb wrote:
Google Health is a decent entry into the game-changing (and potentially hugely profitable) world of health 2.0. But in comparison with other health startups, Google Health has a limited scope and is not as innovative a service as we've come to expect from Google.”
In other words, the market potential was there to be harnessed, but Google just couldn’t figure out an innovative way of doing it right; and for a company with such pedigree and resources, this points to a worrisome trend.
We all know what a great consumer company Google is, but the healthcare and energy sectors are two of the most centralized and bureaucratic industries. As such, it’s simply an exercise in futility to imagine that one can make any meaningful contribution in these two sectors without the cooperation of the healthcare providers and utilities.
Google Lively, Google Buzz, and now Google Health and Google PowerMeter... the list of Google’s failed projects keeps increasing, and so too do the voices of critics who have always believed that Google just can’t succeed on anything outside of search.
— Paul Whyte is a Fulbright Scholar and was recently awarded a PhD in Civil Engineering at Michigan Technological University.
Thanks Mhhfive for a great comment. You are absolutely right but don’t you also think that Google missed a golden opportunity pave the standardization of health records you mentioned with Google Health?
Google is just one big company that would like to organize useful information... the real shame here seems that there are no standardized formats for commonly useful information like health records. If healthcare providers were required to store records in a standard format -- it wouldn't matter if Google Health failed. The data would still be portable and readable (hopefully!) by other means. Instead, health records are locked away in all kinds of crazy proprietary formats that reduce people's ability to maximize the benefit of having them in the first place....
I know how Google was made by algorithms, but their use of math in continuing projects leaves me in despair. Yes, it may be true that enduring projects have a scaling pattern, but it doesn't mean that all projects that will endure will have that same pattern. I still mourn over Wave. Sigh.
Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in “friend” paper—and sharing really suffers...
Talk about privacy!
You know, sometimes it's nice to be living in a country where your medical records are never entered in a computer and no hacker or marketer is able to make use of them unless they walk into the clinic and steal the paper file. And even then it's like: Now what?
really scary stuff. But maybe more people than we thought, actually care about keeping their personal info out of the hands of maketing specialists. Imagine your medical record inundated with commercials for the latest pill, potion or elixer based on the results of your recent lab test results or doctoer visit. Google failing isn't always a bad thing.
Huh? Nothing I said suggested that I believed Google started out these ventures with the idea of paving the way for someone else to succeed where they failed. That would be absurd. But my point remains: who cares? I don't mean that in a flippant way, I'm being serious. If your analysis is about Google, then ok, I'll just bow out of the discussion, because I don't really have anything to add there. But if your prime focus is on these two projects, as I thought it was, and what's going to become of them now, then my point remains. I believe strongly that google's missteps can be someone else's success. Someone obviously will pick up the lead - probably has done already - and will make something happen in this space (i.e. health and energy). Maybe it'll be more grassroots than google is capable of doing, which would be a refreshing change. I know this forum seems to be geared toward large enterprise, but thankfully there remain many smaller companies in the world doing truly great work with limited budgets and extraordinary vision.
And I, for one, am not a fan of having the planet's most egregeous invader of private information, holding my medical records
Kurt, that's exactly what I was thinking. Google is well known for their passion for sharing our private information with our Gmail contact list. Health info is probably best not stored with Google.
Agree completely. and what better way to maintain a healthy bottom line than to dump losers at the outset.
Healthcare is not one big entity that holds a repository of patient info that needs management. Healthcare in the USA is a plethora of individual entities each with their own records systems and local laws governing the management of those records. And I, for one, am not a fan of having the planet's most egregeous invader of private information, holding my medical records. Maybe that's why they couldn'tm sell it to anyone.
"But it's those things that it does poorly that might most readily open doors for other ambitious creative companies to learn from the giant's mistakes, which are very visible, and succeed by doing what they didn't do, and not doing what they did do."
I don't want to believe that Google originally set itself in the way you just described. I believe in starting these projects, Google must have had high expectations for these projects. Google never intended these projects to serve as ‘Guinea pigs” or for someone to financially benefit from an idea it started. As you rightly stated, other companies or individuals will pick up these failed projects in the future, learn from the mistakes of the past and position themselves to build a better product. Google however will certainly not cherish the idea of having to be the one to provide corporate lessons on " how not to fail'. We know that Google's principal technology and business domain is in search but concerns are growing now on its consistent failure to succeed in other niche vertical markets.
To Mr Whyte, and others who have commented on Google's seeming floundering with these "World-Saving Projects": this situation does not mean that these world-saving projects are dead. I'm not even sure what your concern is here, whether you're commenting on Google or on the projects.
Google, like any business enterprise, has hits and misses. We all have a degree of interest in what Google does well and what it does poorly.
But it's those things that it does poorly that might most readily open doors for other ambitious creative companies to learn from the giant's mistakes, which are very visible, and succeed by doing what they didn't do, and not doing what they did do.
If the projects are important - and I agree that at this time in our history both health and energy are presenting new challenges for us all, and so these projects to help funnel needed information to the people do appear to be more significant now than ever - they will find their way to the light of day, with Google or without Google.
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