In a recent blog post, Renewing old resolutions for the new year, Google announced the closing of a number of publicly available services and tools. The search giant has been on a killing rampage with the goal of removing under-performing and peripheral businesses from it’s portfolio.

Examples of the recently killed Google programs include:

• Buzz social network
• Google Labs
• Google Health

We are pretty saddened at one of the now-doomed services, Picnik, an online photo editing toolset. Picnik is possibly the best-known of the services that  Google is killing. The craziest part is that Google purchased the company less than a year ago–in March 2010. Most likely, Google will be incorporating photo editing tools into it’s core products, and perhaps even recycling the Picnik technology.

Other tools that will be phased out, rolled-up or merged:

• Google Message Continuity (GMC)
• Google Sky Map
• Needlebase
• Social Graph API
• Urchin: This online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics

By Brian Franchell

Recent highly anticipated IPOs like LinkedIn and Zillow have shown the dire importance of experienced leadership upon the lead up to becoming public. All aspects of the business must be running optimally in order to have the grace of the initial investors and in order to go public with a bang instead of a thump.

The current string of events have set Groupon far below this mark. For one, Groupon’s number two, Margo Georgiadis, has left the company only to go back into the hands of previous employer Google. The fact that she stayed with the company a mere five months says more than enough. This is enough to cast a dark shadow over the company right before its anticipated IPO, but matters have since only gotten worse for Groupon and its youthful CEO Andrew Mason.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has ruled that Groupon can only recognize its commissions as revenue and not the gross value of vouchers as it had been doing up to this date. Thus, Groupon has been forced to restate its financial records- putting investors in an increasingly anxious position. As a result, Groupon’s 2011 reported earnings have shrunken by more than half from 1.52 billion initially to about 688 million now.

In the end, this puts Groupon on a rather weak foundation with investors and an increasingly enfeebled position upon going public. It seems unlikely Groupon would be able to recover its former glory. It looks as if grey skies are ahead for Groupon and its inevitable IPO.