• There's No Success Like Failure: Google's Biggest Product Flops

    Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    Here’s some infographic perspective on the eve of Facebook’s copycat Facebook Places launch, which has some ringing the death knell for location based startups Foursquare and Gowalla.

    A stroll through the Google graveyard is a lesson in how rarely it works out when successful companies stop focusing on their core competency to go after the little guys. Between Wave, Jaiku, and Foursquare precursor Dodgeball, Google’s a repeat offender in the “failing to kill the next big thing” department.

    With the launch of today’s check-in utility, it seems like the Facebook product team might be following in the search giant’s startup-crushing footsteps. After all, when was the last time you asked a Facebook Question?

    Image: Wordstream

    Company: Google
    Website: google.com
    Launch Date: September 7, 1998
    IPO: NASDAQ:GOOG

    Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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