Google said it will terminate services for Stadia, its troubled cloud gaming service, after it failed to gain traction with players almost three years after its launch. Stadia was an attempt from Alphabet Inc.'s Google to take on the video game console giants with a platform of its own. Unlike traditional consoles, Stadia allowed users to play games on devices such as Android phones and Chromecast apps for TV, by funneling data directly from Google's server clusters. "While Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected," Phil Harrison, Stadia vice president and general manager, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "So we've made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service."

Google is skipping its tradition of designing an April Fools' Day joke on its front page during the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement came from Lorraine Twohill, Google's chief marketing officer, who informed company management of the decision in an email. According to Twohill, the decision was made'out of respect' for everyone currently working to fight against the spread of COVID-19. Google will forgo its annual tradition of posting an April Fools' Day joke for the first time since the tradition began in 2000, a decision the company says was made'out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic' 'Under normal circumstances, April Fool's is a Google tradition and a time to celebrate what makes us an unconventional company,' Twohill wrote, according to a Business Insider report. 'This year, we're going to take the year off from that tradition out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.

Holland is one of the greatest countries to live in, but the biggest downside is that it rains 145 days a year. That's why the Google Cloud Platform team in the Netherlands is launching Google Wind this Spring. We leveraged existing Dutch infrastructure to realize this moonshot in record time. We upgraded some historical windmills in Holland with control modules connected to Google Cloud Platform. Google Wind then uses Machine Learning to recognize cloud patterns and orchestrate the network of windmills when rain is approaching.