Bloody Thursday: Google Deadpools All Slide Products Except One | TechCrunch

So Google has is shutting down Slide after spending $200M last year. Another proof that you can’t buy social juju, and graft it onto a monster company that is socially blind? Or maybe Google doesn’t need internal competition to Google+, or teams building iOS apps?

MG Siegler

Because we needed more big tech news this week. Yes, it’s true that Google has just brought the hammer down on Slide, as Liz Gannes of AllThingsD first reported earlier this evening. Yes, it’s also true that Max Levchin is leaving. Now we also know the fate of all of the Slide products. And it’s not pretty.

All of them are being discontinued — except one, we’ve learned. This means both the Slide products before Google’s acquisition of the company a year ago, and the newer ones that the Slide team has been building within Google for the past year. Yes, it includes the newer products like Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, and the just-launched-last-week Photovine. They’re all dead.

The lone exception is Prizes.org (which we covered here), we’ve heard. The reason is that this was developed by the Slide team in China for Google, and they’ll keep pursuing it, apparently.

It was only last August that Google bought Slide for around $200 million after employee bonuses. The idea was to get more serious about social games, as well as to get proven entrepreneur Levchin on board. But a lot has changed in the past year — for one thing Eric Schmidt is no longer CEO. For another, Google now has Google+.

Slide had been running as a completely autonomous unit broken down into smaller teams within Google. For a while, that seemed like a good strategy that may keep Google nimble. Now it just looks kind of silly.

Slide was so autonomous that many were working on products that competed with features that were a part of Google+. And many of the apps created were iOS-first, and didn’t work at all on Google’s Android platform.