Categories: Web

Google to retire Google Health and Google PowerMeter

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.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

View Comments

Recent Posts

WEF calls on stakeholders to ‘inoculate’ public against disinformation ‘super-spreaders’: report

Those who decry 'disinformation' the loudest almost never give any examples of what they're denouncing:…

2 days ago

Shift left, ship fast: How software teams can offer speed without sacrificing quality (Brains Byte Back Podcast)

Even the biggest software companies understand that moving quickly is no longer a luxury; it's…

3 days ago

Extremists weaponize COVID, climate issues with conspiracy theories about state & elite control: RAND Europe

The RAND Europe authors are so stuck in their own echo chamber they don't realize…

7 days ago

Digital ID, vaccine passports are expanding to pets & livestock: UN AI for Good report

Humans, animals & commodities alike are all to be digitally tagged, tracked-and-traced equally: perspective The…

1 week ago

Teaching with tech: What’s changing and why It Matters (Brains Byte Back Podcast)

Teaching has changed a lot over the years, from chalkboards to laptops, from printed worksheets…

2 weeks ago

‘Enormously intrusive’ collaborative sensing is beneficial to society: WEF podcast

The massive city-wide surveillance that collaborative sensing requires is a tremendous temptation for tyrants: perspective…

2 weeks ago