This doesn't come at all as a surprise to me. Google Labs was well known internally for being a graveyard for projects that, ironically, was really hard to launch stuff in. Anything that Google launches anywhere automatically gets a huge amount of traffic, and, because it has the Google brand on it, it's expected to meet a fairly high quality, stability, and scalability bar. In practice, this meant was never really possible to use Labs for throwing something up quickly to see if it stuck. This, combined with the maintenance overhead of keeping the various projects running (which were often grafted onto other larger codebases), makes shutting it down a pretty obvious decision.
Obvious decision or not, Google Labs has been one of my favorite parts of Google for years. For me at least, this deprecation pushes Google one notch closer to "boring megacorp" and one notch further away from the sort of cool "research garden" that Google is famous for being. I'm not saying Labs was the forefront of Google research, just that it was a fun, lighthearted place where nifty (and often quite strange) ideas could be trotted out.
For me it's not even so much the research angle, as the power-user-features angle. Via Google Labs you could enable features and interface customizations that for various reasons didn't make sense to put into the default product, especially in Gmail and Google Maps. Some were not at all researchy, just simple interface enhancements, like the "drop lat/lon marker" feature in Google Maps. I'll miss that flexibility if they don't replace it with some kind of advanced-options config.
Ah cool; it looks like that clarification was added in an update. I had assumed that those were part of the overall "Google Labs" project, but maybe that was just a (now-obsolete) branding strategy to tie together all the "labs" stuff.
> Anything that Google launches anywhere automatically gets a huge amount of traffic
...if it's actually Google-branded. Perhaps Google means to do its future experiments more like Searchmash, where the project just happened to be run by Google, but had no mention of Google anywhere on it.
Wrong on so many counts. Look at the Google Labs pages. There are 7 of them out with at least 1.5 are "graduated" to read products. Labs is very good playground when you don't know how things will shape and you don't want to be confined by corp mandates of tools, processes etc. If things takes off then it gets graduated to real product by having more people work on it.
If you look at Labs projects, many are pretty cool. Things like Google Groups came out of Labs.
Labs decision might be the stupidest decision yet execs have made there. They are investing huge in buying small start ups and they have even thing like Google ventures. It doesn't make any sense to kill of Labs.
