In late 2012, Google announced that it was shutting down Google Calendar Sync in mid-2013.  This plugin for Microsoft Outlook allows the synchronization of contacts and calendars between the Outlook application and Google’s services (namely GMail and Google Calendar).

Google stopped allowing new registrations of the plugin in July 2013, and this week, they shut down interactivity to its services from the plugin entirely.

I get that companies do this, but come on.  No way to sync between Outlook and Google Calendar (which powers the calendar on Android devices) is a real inconvenience for me and many others.  With more than 80% market share (300M units running Android OS), I’m sure it’s a process step in driving consumers away from dependency on Microsoft Office and toward Google’s products.

Manually updating my Google contacts from Outlook isn’t a big deal, but my source for day-to-day calendar operations is Outlook and I hate to lose access to this information from my device.