New York — In an attempt to “prioritize its product efforts,” Google CEO Larry Page is making good on his promise to put more wood behind fewer arrows, announced in a blog post on Wednesday that it will “shut down,” Google Labs, the company’s popular incubator for experimental features and products, as the Mountain View company diverts more of its resources and efforts on its core products.
According to an influential tech blog PCMag, referencing Page’s recent memo to employees disclosing the company’s decision to pull down its ailing Google Health and PowerMeter services, Bill Coughran, a Google senior vice president for research and systems infrastructure, wrote that closing Google Labs was also part of the company’s new agenda of “prioritizing our product efforts.”
Bill Coghran, SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure had to say:
Last week we explained that we are prioritizing our product efforts. As part of that process, we have also resolved to wind down Google Labs. While we have learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we are to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead, Coughran wrote in a blog post entitled: “More wood behind fewer arrows”.
In many cases, this will mean ending Labs experiments — in others we will incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas. And many of the Labs products that are Android apps today will continue to be available on Android Market. We will update you on our progress via the Google Labs website.
We will continue to push speed and innovation — the impetus behind Google Labs — across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed.
Google describes Labs as a “playground where our more verturesome users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them.”
Google employees, who are permitted to dedicate up to 20 percent of their time working on side-projects. Google Labs products were available as prototypes that users could try out and provide feedback on, while Google made ongoing changes and adjustments.
A Google spokesman said the closure of Google Labs was unrelated to the company’s 20 percent time policy.
“We do not have any reform to announce regarding 20 percent time. We will continue to dedicate a subset of our time to newer and experimental projects. In fact, we will be focusing this same creative energy on bigger bets, with bigger potential long-term payoffs,” the Google spokesman said in an emailed statement.
Google Labs, currently operated by engineers Alon Halevy, Matthew Watson, Henry Rowley, Trevor Johnston, and Mohamed Eldawy, has served as testing ground for new Google projects and features added to existing Google products and services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Wave.
However, testing on the Labs website was often carried out on an invitation-only basis, a process Google used in the initial rollout of its new Google+ social networking service launched in June.
Among the products listed as “alumni” of Google Labs on the Labs website are Google Alerts, Google Maps, Google Reader and Google Docs all began in Labs and have, in Google-speak, “graduated” to become mainstream features.
The most recent Google Labs project to be introduced was Swiffy — the SWF to HTML5 file converter. Other projects to come out this year include: Google Scribe, Julia Map, Art Project, Google Correlate, Page Speed Online, and Google Talk Guru.
Additionally, some other notable experiments to materialize over the years include: Fast Flip, Google Goggles, Google Listen, Google News Timeline, Public Data Explorer, Google Squared, Sky Map for Android, Shopper, Google Moderator, Google Code Search, Google Mars, Google Desktop, Google Groups, Google Alerts, iGoogle and Google Suggest.
Nevertheless, Labs within Google Maps and Gmail will not be affected, the company said in an afternoon update to its blog post, so those concerned about losing their popular Gmail Labs features like Multiple Inboxes and Undo Send need not worry. “We will continue to experiment with new features in each of our products,” Google said.