Google leads legacy Voice phone service out behind the barn, two shots ring out

It appears that today's victim of the Chocolate Factory axeman is legacy Google Voice for personal accounts. To be fair, and despite Google's apparent delight at killing off services, this one has been on the cards for a while, certainly since the company overhauled the user interface in 2017 with its "modern experience." …

[katrinab]

What you should have learned years ago is not to rely on Google services, even paid-for services, for anything.

[Joe W]

To be fair, other big companies are also doing this - just not to the extent that google does it (I believe). Microsoft comes to my mind, also content platforms (Zune? ok, that was MS, right? like Skype, which was changed until it was useless and even more of a ressource hog). Maybe google just has more "services", and tries a lot of stuff out, and not everything is actually sustainable in the long run - shame that actually useful stuff gets killed off. Ooh, and then there's companies that offer free storage for photos etc. and then f' up the interface, and then tell you that you have a month to migrate all of your data... (forgot who that was).

Oh, and don't get me started about companies that buy other companies, just to kill off the product! (like Skype, which just was f'd up - but also like the Pebble watch).

[DS999]

No one does it to the extent Google does, and it isn't even close. You can find a few examples here and there where Microsoft or Apple or Facebook abandoned something but with Google it is a much greater than 50/50 chance any new product they introduce will be killed within a few years.

What's worse is that Google will encourage third parties to integrate those products into theirs, so you end up with stuff like hardware advertised with Google Voice support. Though it is because I refuse to use any Google products if I can help it, I bought Ooma for my landline replacement, not one of the potentially bricked products that relied on Google Voice so I dodged that bullet!

[heyrick]

What's even worse is that Google doesn't even consider releasing their abandoned projects as open source, you know, for the people that did actually use them.

[Pirate Dave]

Gmail will never die. There's too much data to be mined in those emails for Google to ever (willingly) give it up.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Gmail will never die, like Yahoo! Mail

Gmail hosts so many scammers that you'd think it's on the chopping block too. It has progressed from being the scam's "Reply-To" to being the actual sender.

Gmail is surviving on manually created exclusions from automated blocking. Eventually people will get tired of the spam and let the filters do their work. Google's hope that everyone avoids Gmail's spam by using Gmail's inbound filtering isn't going to happen.

[Auntie Dix]

Rich B@stards Don't Care

Follow the $.

Grand Central was bought out by Gaggle: That started the clock ticking.

For what to them is chump change, big companies buy midgets, easily acquiring IP and wiping competition.

Later, the giants let the bits they do not desire die on the vine. To hell with customers who need those bits!

Once Mom & Pop no longer own the store, the food is sh-eet, because CORPORATE MANAGEMENT (especially, private-equity vulchers) today means DRIVE OUT ALL COST RELENTLESSLY.

That's why Dunkin' Donuts -- owned later by holding companies and private-equity creeps like Bain Capital (Mitt Romney's ilk) -- now has a shortened moniker and far fewer doughnut varieties, all of which in recent decades taste like crap.

[Dan 55]

Is it time to check killedbygoogle.com again?

243 have been buried, 2 are scheduled to be buried so far this year, perhaps it would be quicker just to list the remaining surviving services.

Shame if you bought an OnHub router, they're going to turn into landfill at the end of the year.

[chazzzer]

This slays me, the comments jumped on the slam Google for killing off Google Voice bandwagon, when they did nothing of the sort. They killed off a few obscure services that almost nobody still used, but free Google Voice is still going strong into 2023. People have been predicting the demise of free Google Voice since shortly after they bought Grand Central in 2007. Every year people were sure that they would start charging for it next year. 15 years later, it's still free and better than ever.

The author of this story was shameless for portraying it as if personal Google Voice was going away. The message Google sent couldn't have been more clear: "Don’t freak out – Google Voice for personal accounts isn’t going anywhere, and today’s news only applies to users who have a personal Google Account. The web app is undergoing some major changes and modernizations. Starting in February, Google will be deprecating the “Legacy” version in favor of its new UI and tools. First and foremost, instead of accessing the tool via its old URL, it’s now being moved over to voice.google.com." How did they get all the doom and gloom out of that?