Google's promotion and incentive structure is built around launching products. This will launch, putter along for a couple of years and then get shuttered unless it's a surprise success.
> This will launch, putter along for a couple of years and then get shuttered unless it's a surprise success.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but isn't that effectively how Silicon Valley as a whole operates? Most startups putter along for a few years before running out of money and getting shuttered. A couple become surprise successes and take off.
Google is effectively just a single corporation acting like a hive of startups.
Sure, though technology or ideas from products that aren't successful is often incorporated in future projects.
Honestly there's a really good blog post/article waiting to be written grouping and classifying shuttered google projects into groups based on purposes, because for a lot of them, they aren't created to be successes or make money, but for other business reasons, legal precedents, creating competition or disrupting a particular business segment, etc.
Whether the motivation for their behavior is because of a promotion-based incentive structure or some sort of deep 3d chess corporate strategy, neither makes me excited to use their products when released. Fool me once...
Without knowing any details (and too lazy too look it up) it might be just the case that this was built on some old framework/technology that now has been deprecated and the effort to bring it up to date was not worth it.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but isn't that effectively how Silicon Valley as a whole operates? Most startups putter along for a few years before running out of money and getting shuttered. A couple become surprise successes and take off.
Google is effectively just a single corporation acting like a hive of startups.