opinion : the death of google labs (especially health)

It is a sad day, as I found out that Google is shutting down at labs applications. I've long been a fan of this part of the company and it will be disappointing to see it go I am particularly annoyed that many good applications are going to simply stop existing, particularly Google health. It is a little bizarre when you log on and they tell you to “please switch your information to Microsoft”. Looking at their blogs, it appears that Google closed the project down because it did not get the number of users that they had intended. Google is being foolish here however, as Health never got popular because it was never really marketed properly , or at all for that matter. Many people in healthcare did not even know that it existed, including many of my colleagues. Had Google advertised it to all these people using its other services(gmail or search ads), I have no doubt that the health service would've spread.

Google has clearly not learned its lesson from the days of Google video. Google video was a service similar to YouTube (but technically superior) that Google did not do much marketing for either. As a result Google video was crushed in popularity by YouTube and Google was forced to spend billions of dollars to buy YouTube to compete in the segment that they had innovated in. This is a great example of how a company will suffer if it has many great engineers but not enough good business people to capitalize on their innovations. Google health is not the only labs application that has suffered in this regard. I'm sure that many more people would've used Google squares and several other innovative programs had Google pushed them on its regular users more aggressively.

The fact that Microsoft is going full speed ahead with their health portal also suggests this is a big area in the future. It is a matter of time before electronic medical records become common, and as patients become more interested in seeing in controlling their data, the appeal of health records applications will be huge. Google will learn its lesson when future versions of Microsoft Office are sold to doctors at marked up prices because they include health vault software, and will then be forced to buy some start up competitor to compete.

Now let's just hope that they do not get rid of Google Body - my current favorite Google application.