[Klathmon]

Well in all honesty if you end up leaning on it heavily in spite of the warning you kind of deserve whatever you get...

>This is a Beta release of Cloud Shell. This feature is not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy and may be subject to backward-incompatible changes.

[rexignis]

I wasn't explicit with my earlier comment, you're right about the beta period. I was referring to after when they exit beta and are a good, useful service for a year or two.

[Klathmon]

Which would be understandable if they ever shut down any cloud service offering of this level before (which they have not).

This whole "Google loves to shut stuff down" is really tired and overplayed.

Go ahead and compare Google's track record with Apple's or Microsoft's, or any other company. They are about on par, yet Google almost always gives 6+ months notice (often over a year), provides one-click alternatives, allows you to export your data in one of many formats, and more often than not has an in-house alternative that you can use automatically.

Take a look at the wiki page of google's products [1]. I'd be surprised if you even knew about 10% of those, let alone used more 1 or 2 significantly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...

[rexignis]

On that list that I've used: Buzz, Pack, Desktop, Reader, iGoogle.

To Be Discontinued: Google Drive Hosting, Google Code.

I don't think it's tired and overplayed. It's a consequence of how Google works; try lots of things and don't be afraid to pull the plug. That strategy is great, and it works.

It's just sometimes the services that are on the edge of being worth Google's time to maintain cause the most backlash because a fair number of people used those services.

[plonh]

What to all those free consumer services that you don't pay for and and aren't connected to things you pay for have in common?

[acdha]

Google refused to allow you to pay for them? Each of those services could trivally have had some combination of ads and paid services but Google's management made strategic decisions to put resources elsewhere.

Only using paid services up front might seem to help but one look at the way Google Apps has been in maintenance mode for years suggests that even that offers only limited protection.

[wstrange]

Realistically, how many people would have paid for something like Google Reader after getting it for free for so many years? I think it would be a tough sell and you would have witnessed a lot of complaining...

On the other hand, the negative PR they have gotten from Reader (it's pretty much the poster child for the "Google cancels products" meme) - they probably should have kept it around, even if it was not strategic.

[larrys]

"or any other company"

Any other company? You've named three. Truth is enterprise grade companies that serve the business market and don't give their products away for free or participate in a race to the bottom typically don't do this type of thing to the degree that google does. Perhaps the companies that do (including parts of msft) are those that deal with developers or consumers which apparently are more likely to not complain to much (other than to whine online) when they get the shaft. The stereotype, unfortunately, is true. At least that is what I have found.

Also, and this is important, there is the benign neglect phase where they simply keep the product minimally working but don't spend any time to improve it (like google voice).

[TheIronYuppie]

Disclosure: I work for Google.

To the best of my recollection, I don't believe we've ever shutdown a product. Was there one in particular that hit you? (Reader, Wave, etc are totally different divisions.)

[toyg]

Google Code was first turned into a graveyard, then deprecated, and soon will shut down altogether. Reader was not strictly a development tool (which is what I guess you refer to as "your division"), but was heavily used by developers, so it significantly disrupted people's workflow. Same for Wave and any web API (there's quite a few of them which were unceremoniously dumped).

[KirinDave]

It is not really Google's fault that Code was not a successful product, other than that they simply didn't have the energy/budget/will to actually make it a competitive product with Github.

[toyg]

Saying Google "doesn't have the budget" to do something is fairly preposterous, tbh. I can understand that they were wrong-footed by the rise of Github; Code was built to compete with Sourceforge, when GH didn't even exist. From day 1 though, it was clear that Code wasn't even "better enough" to actually kill SF for good; further development was incredibly slow. When Github hit their stride, Google reacted by just giving up. They didn't even attempt a comeback.

So yeah, I think it's entirely their fault.

[abiox]

well, google isn't a small business, where "the budget" can be synonymous with "the bank account(s)". like many (all?) large businesss, things are organizationally regimented into units (and sub-units, etc), and budgets are allocated toward each unit.

so while "google" might have funds, the "google code development team" may have a very tiny allocation.

[jrochkind1]

I think there was no reason for them to keep Google Code as a going concern with the rise of Github. They were not going to do as good a job as Github, and it wasn't something they were making any money off of.

Even if they had been trying.

But yes, like many Google products, it was basically released and abandoned. They weren't trying. (If they had been, maybe we never would have had a github...)

I do think as a public service, they could have left all the code (and wiki documentation) accessible read-only virtually perpetually. Surely they can afford that.

Instead, we get tarball download only, and only until late 2016, after which it's all gone forever, if it hasn't been migrated elsewhere by code owners or third parties.

[jrochkind1]

Are the different divisions not Google?

But it is more common for a Google product to be completely abandoned, no new features, few bugfixes, etc., as opposed to being actually shut down.

[rexignis]

Google Drive hosting, to be fair it still works and you guys gave plenty of heads up (August 31, 2016). Just because they are in different divisions doesn't mean Google hasn't shut things down.

[iso-8859-1]

Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2881970

[TheIronYuppie]

Crap. I literally meant to say "Google Cloud" and didn't. Yes, I'm well aware other products were shut down, but Google Cloud has not.

[jlarocco]

Oh brother. I guess if you're using the strict definition that a product is only something people pay for, then you may be right, but in the more generally accepted meaning that a Google product is something Google makes that people outside of Google use, you're just flat out wrong.

There's a long, long list of Google products and services that have been discontinued, as somebody else already linked to in this thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...