Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. How many DAUs would stadia or hangouts or even reader have today?

I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs.

But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating.

I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then.

They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.

This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object.

Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.

Most people would argue that Stadia would have many. Many people loved Google Reader. There are numerous examples of things that were great and were killed, because they hadn't monetized enough or "fast enough", and when you are chasing results on a quarterly basis, you can't always get things that will generate tremendous value with more time.

I think the complaint about Google specifically is that they seem to do these things and commit to what seem to be whole lines of business without an actual business plan to make it viable.

It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.

I don't disagree with your point.

It's interesting to imagine if there's some kind of middle ground where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent? I suspect at least some of people's frustration is that X or Y was pitched as something serious, which then grates some when it gets canceled.

But maybe you can't launch a product without pretending it's going to be real because it'll be dead on arrival?

Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products.

If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.