Failed Google Products

In the tech world, failure is as much a feature of innovation as success. Google is known for its collection of wildly popular products, from Search to Maps to Android. But not everything the company touches turns to gold. Google Glass was supposed to change the world, but quickly became a punch line. The best innovations are the ones that everybody thinks are doomed to fail.

Orkut – It was a popular social networking service that grew out of a Googler's "20 per cent time" project. The site was more popular abroad than it was in the US. Google decided to kill it in September 2014. Google's Nexus Q, a streaming media player that was designed to connect all home devices, was unveiled with great fanfare at the company's 2012 developer conference. Google's virtual worlds only lasted a little over a year. Google said it created Lively because it wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways," but it just didn't catch on. Lively was shut down in 2008.

iGoogle, a personalized homepage, was shut down in 2013. It allowed users to customize their homepage with widgets. Google said iGoogle wasn't needed as much anymore since apps could run on Chrome and Android. Originally intended to give people access to health and wellness information, Google Health was closed for good in January 2012 after Google observed the service was "not having the broad impact that we hoped it would".

The Google Play edition Android phone was introduced in the spring of 2014. But by January 2015, they were listed as "no longer available for sale" and a Galaxy S5 edition of the phone never materialized. Google first unveiled Glass in dramatic fashion in 2012, but the device never reached the masses. Glass came with a high price tag, software issues, and potential privacy problems and generally looked too nerdy. Google ended consumer sales of Glass in January 2015, but it is working on a new version now.

Google Buzz was a social networking service that was integrated into Gmail, but it was plagued with problematic privacy issues and never caught on. The company announced in October 2011 it would shut down the service to focus on Google+ instead. Google Answers was the first project Google worked on and started as an idea from Larry Page. Answers lasted for more than four years but stopped accepting questions in 2006.