Google killed Google Desktop! I simply cannot believe that such a great desktop tool has been discontinued, particularly for the weird hypothesis Google is citing that people are moving to "cloud" based storage.
Sure people are "sort of" gradually going in that direction but they aren't by any means there in such mass or with such momentum that this move makes any sense. Not for what Google Desktop did. Through your browser you could search old web pages visited, e-mails, text and other documents, all with the same confidence that you might Google the web. The results would appear before you instantly. If you were particularly geeky you could actually catalog your files and create custom tags that you trusted GD would find and organize later. It wasn't just a run-of-the-mill search utility, it was the first part of a completely customized and efficient reference ecology.
Even if people somehow all switched exclusively to cloud storage in a single instant, there are still 2 decades of desktop stuff left behind on our hard drives. Also, I'd like to point out that a full-scale conversion from desktop to Internet based computing is not absolutely assured. It's not like every PC user in the world is going to decide for themselves that it makes sense to store their data somewhere "out there". Particularly as part of a contract in exchange for "eyeball time", which is the binding staple at the many free web services. And even if people did, how wussy of Google to not to keep up developing GD in that direction! It could, to the best of its ability, index Dropbox just as easily as it might the My Documents folder.
I'm frustrated over this as there really is nothing comparable. I found out about this the hard way while seeking to reinstall GD following my first PC reconditioning in about 3 years. I suspect that many people who are enjoying a similarly wide desktop life cycle will be in for the same shock when it comes time to reformat and they find this announcement.
