Google has been going through an extended ‘spring cleaning’ this year as it has consigned several older products to the cyber dustbin.
Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen, and Google Video For Business will all be discontinued by the end of this year.
Google Apps for Teams was released in 2008, and it allowed you, with a verified school or business account, to collaborate with Google Docs, Google Calendar and other services that were not related to email. Google Director of Engineering Max Ibel announced the ending of this program last week. He noted that Apps for Teams never really took off as anticipated, and people did not find it as useful as Google thought it would be. Any existing accounts with this program will be converted into personal accounts as of Sept. 4, 2012.
Google Listen was intended to help you find podcasts and to listen to them. However, the podcast function now is handled by Google Play, so this product has been expendable for some time. The podcast search feature will no longer function after Nov. 1.
Google Video For Business was first built on the top of the Youtube infrastructure, and it specialized in internal communications specifically for schools and business. This fall, this program will migrate to the new Google Drive.
Also, Google is cleaning out its blog space as well. There are several seldom-updated blogs in the Google system, and the company intends to get its number of blogs down to about 150.
This latest housecleaning is part of the larger effort of Google since Larry Page became CEO in April 2011, to focus the firm more on its ‘high impact products that millions of people use, multiple times per day,’ according to Senior VP Alan Eustace.