“We celebrate our failures,” was the exact statement of Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “When it comes to failures, Google’s celebrating more than you might realize”. Hm, as I have understood from near history Google rarely sounds like it’s celebrating these mistakes. But, as motivation note, those statements could be positive only -  for developers of failure projects.

Just to be reminded, and catch some positive spirit if you have some failed project recently, here are the list of 5 proofs that Google’s ideas can fail also:

1. Google Wave (May 2009 to August 2010): Google Wave was perhaps one of the most heavily hyped products that Google’s put out. The company announced it would close Aug 5, 2010 (see Google Wave Crashes).
2. Google SearchWiki (November 2008 to March 2010): SearchWiki allowed anyone to shape their search results manually. You could delete results you didn’t like and move others to the top of the list. Closed in March 2010, Google gave up on the service.
3. Google Audio Ads (January 2006 to February 2009): A radio-based advertising platform, for $102 million in cash along with future performance payments that could have totaled up to $1.1 billion. There were other issues, including how Google worked — or didn’t work well — with radio stations.
4. Google Video (January 2005 to January 2009): Before Google bought YouTube in 2006, it was already trying to build its own video sharing service. That was Google Video, launched in January 2005.In August 2007 Google offered full refunds to its “video” customers.
5. Dodgeball (May 2005 to January 2009): January 2009 was a major month of celebration at Google. At the same time it celebrated shuttering Google Video, because it ultimately had to buy success via YouTube, it also announced another failure: Dodgeball.

And, here are our predictions for upcoming Google Product failures:

• Orkut: Back before Facebook, Google was already playing the social networking game with Orkut, launched in January 2004. Over six years later, Orkut is big in Brazil, India and Iran (if I recall correctly). That’s pretty much it. Even in Brazil and India, Facebook may be edging it out.
• Google Knol: Google’s semi-challenger to Wikipedia doesn’t appear to have gained much traction since it was formally launched in July 2008.
• Google Sidewiki: Google’s tool that allows anyone to add comments to any web site appears to be little used. It was launched in September 2009.
• Google Buzz: Google’s supposed challenger to Twitter, Facebook and even Foursquare had a deeply flawed launch in February 2010 and quickly caused the company to come under fire for privacy concerns.

Anyway, Google has had plenty of successes, huge ones, from its original search engine through to products like Google Maps, Gmail and the Android mobile operating system.

Google’s encouraged a culture of “20% time,” where engineers can spend 20% of their work time on whatever they’d like. Sometimes this goes in directions of failure but most of the time in full success. Google as company isn’t afraid of killing projects that don’t pan out well. This should be standard procedure established in every software development company.

Sometimes those failures even come back as success. Google Voice Search failure comes back with Google Telephony which, by many, will be the feature of telecommunications.

Tags | Business, DetectorPro shot, Failures, Internet, Opinion