Yesterday Google announced they were closing Google Labs, a site Google used to show off its new innovations. What is Google signaling by shutting this site down?
Many of Google's innovative products have passed through Google Labs prior to launching to the public. It was intended to allow users to play with new Google technology and see how Google was thinking and responding to needs in the market.
I was always amazed with how transparent Google was with sharing its innovations. I felt they were very confident, and almost arrogant, to be able to put up technology they were essentially experimenting with, and allowing anyone, including competitors, to see the work they were doing. It was like Google was trying to taunt the competition, challenging the market to try and compete with the work Google was producing.
While Google's blog post states that they are closing down Google Labs so as to focus on more important products, are they deciding that they need to start being more secretive about their new products? Are they going to become less transparent and start keeping their new products more secret? This makes sense in a highly competitive market with companies such as Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all fighting for your customers. The last thing you want to do is make it easier for your competitors to try and copy what you are doing.
Google does plan to continue "Labs" innovations inside specific products, such as Google+ and Gmail. But these appear more like new features for existing products, with Google using terms like "labs" and "experiments" in place of "alpha" and "beta". This is not the same as completely new products, which Google Labs used to profile.
As we say "good-bye" to Google Labs, we perhaps say "hello" to a different type of Google; a company, who in its endeavor to "organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful", was once known as being open and transparent about its innovations, but is now just like every other company.
