Last week during Google's quarterly earnings call CEO Larry Page laid out a new vision for the company that seemed to signal that the era of Google Labs was at an end. Page called the approach "more wood behind fewer arrows." This new level of focus will mean more support for major Google projects and ideas but it also meant the search giant trim away projects that didn't work. Page tied this new strategy to Google's recent decision to shut down Google Health and Google PowerMeter Services Google introduced to give users easier access to their health care and energy usage information respectively. Now Google Labs is the latest casualty of the "more wood fewer arrows" approach. It's hard not to feel like we've lost something great as the search giant shuts down Google Labs.
Labs launched way back in 2002 and in its almost 10 years of existence it's been responsible for some of Google's biggest services. Even if a lot of the projects from Google Labs never went beyond the test tube, it was still great for Google to establish a breeding ground for strange and wonderful ideas that didn't fit in anywhere else in the organization. But a second look at Google Labs shows that many of these projects didn't fit anywhere for a reason. Both Gmail and Google Maps originally started as humble lab projects. In recent years the experiments coming out of Google Labs have been less revolutionary and it's wise of the company to focus on the products that really could make as much of a splash as Gmail.

I agree that Google should give more time and support to some of its big name projects, and I can already see how that strategy has served them well on projects like Google+. If Google had been able to put more of its programmers on a project like Google Wave, for instance, then we might still be using it today. Who knows, a more focused Google might even have created something like Google+ right off the bat instead of surprising and annoying Gmail users with Google Buzz. If you still have a favorite project in Google's Labs all hope isn't lost. Google has said that while it will be quietly shutting down some of the projects currently in the Labs others will find a new life integrated into the search giant's other projects and services.

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