Official line
Product discontinued.
Google · Commerce · Product
Google Offers
Discontinued
2011–2013 · 2 years in market
Launched
May 1, 2011
Discontinued
Jan 1, 2013
Cause of death
Too early / too late
Evidence
Unsourced
What was it?
Google’s Groupon clone, launched at the peak of daily-deal mania and gone with the bubble.
Why it died
Editorial reading
Daily deals were a fad with terrible merchant NPS. Google arrived late and left early.
Founder takeaway
Copying a bubble is still a bubble. Local commerce is a sales-force business Google did not want to staff.
Sources
Unsourced — editorial reading
No primary source is attached yet. Treat the interpretation as editorial, not a citation.
Related graves
Same company, category, or cause of death.
RIP
Google Wave
2009–2012 · 3 yrs
A real-time collaborative document that tried to replace email, chat, and wikis at once. Brilliant, baffling, and dead in three years.
Productivity/Too early / too late+9
RIP
Google Catalogs
2011–2015 · 4 yrs
Digitized print catalogs. A museum of a dying medium.
Commerce/Too early / too late+3
RIP
Google Reader
2005–2013 · 8 yrs
The RSS reader a generation of journalists and power users treated as a daily driver. Killed as RSS faded and Google chased social.
Media & Publishing/Low usage+39
RIP
Google Glass (Explorer)
2013–2015 · 2 yrs
A face-mounted computer that made civilians into ‘Glassholes.’ Privacy panic killed the consumer edition; enterprise limped on.
Wearables/Privacy backlash+37