[mywittyname]

Google will be "fine," but I've stopped investing in Google products and I'm sure a lot of the tech-savvy community feel the same way. This will make it more difficult for them to get new products off the ground in the future.

They make excellent products, but they just don't want to invest in them long enough to gain widespread appeal. Inbox was a killer app. Now that I've experienced what brilliant email looks like, I'm going to keep a look out for a competing clone and will likely switch.

It's a vicious cycle. Fewer people will invest in new products until they know it will be around in the future, but then Google will shut down product that don't gain enough users. This is a cancer that slowly eats away at the company bottom line.

[fixermark]

From my point of view, if it's a choice between an ecosystem of tools that Google could kill at their whim and an ecosystem of tools floated and maintained by startup companies that could dry up and die at any time, it's a bit of an illusory choice.

[Kaiyou]

Go for open source tools then. If they are good enough for people to get use out of, they usually stay around. At least I can't think of an example where one disappeared for good.

[fixermark]

That's down an axis of "strictly worse than the alternatives." With an open-source ecosystem, I have to set it up and maintain it myself, when it breaks I have to service it by myself (often without a useful community to assist, because my problems are often unique to my special-snowflake configuration), and if I get attacked I'm 100% responsible for digging out of the assault with no recourse or assistance.

None of these are concerns with either Google's online offerings or the offerings of most startups.