Google Vice President, Bill Coughran, has conveyed that it will no longer be continuing with Google labs and a phasing out process has already been started. The news appeared in the company’s official blog and apparently the Google CEO is sticking to his word of “putting more wood before fewer arrows”.
The closing will affect ongoing Google projects on the web and also the development of various Android applications. The projects won’t be closing down completely but many of them will be folded into other larger projects and further research work will stop. Similarly for android applications, the applications won’t become unavailable but further updates won’t be released.
The decision appears to be a consequence of the new management style of Larry Page, Google’s new CEO. Google says that it wants to focus on the upcoming ‘extra opportunities’ rather going into further research hence, the decision. Few years back, before Gmail was launched, Google became infamous for not launching its product completely even though more than 10 million users became member from invite only.
Another shocking decision was made by Google to discontinue its toolbar services from the latest version of Firefox (Firefox 5.0). Google claims that the ‘new browsers’ are capable enough on their own and don’t need the integration of an add-on like the Google toolbar.
The toolbar won’t be coming in the latest version of Firefox as well as all further versions, but will continue to provide services in the older browsers. The decision is sure disappointing but after all, the search engine giant has his own browser ‘Chrome’ to take care of.
For Firefox, Google toolbar was more than just a search bar, it was also used as a bookmarking tool and was useful for generating a site ranking (according to page scores generated by Google). Many users are not upgrading to the latest version because of the missing toolbar and some are even dreaming for a new toolbar from Google to be released for Firefox. Mozilla is now trying to analyse its options and building on replacements.