Even the big boys have to prioritize

One of the things that I find interesting about Google is that despite being a huge company, they are remarkably agile in moving into new areas as well as dropping old projects. The latter of these is the one that I actually find more intriguing. Over the past couple of years, Google has basically stopped developing Google Notebook, Google Video, Orkut (a social networking site that you've probably never heard of if you're from the US), and probably plenty more web services with which I'm not familiar. If you've visited Gmail recently from IE6 or Firefox 2, you may have noticed Google Apps is phasing out support for older browsers. Over the past few months or so, they have also transitioned away from Google Gears (a framework for webapps to store data locally to allow offline access) in favor of HTML5. Gears seemed to be a huge part of Google's webapp strategy for a while as they integrated it into almost all of their services, but they seemingly jumped to HTML5 without any major qualms.

So how does this relate to small scale software development? Seeing that even Google feels the need to focus it's resources on the important aspects of it's huge suite of web software emphasizes how important it is for a small company or individual to think carefully about what features are really essential, and which ones are worth forgoing in favor of improving the core experience. Similarly, it's easy to hold on to older technologies even in the face of clearly superior alternatives. If a company as big as Google is able to readily update their technology platforms -- despite significant investment in the previous one -- a smaller company has no excuse to exhibit less agility.