Most of the google products that have been shut down that HN loves to harp about were shut down not because they failed to reach some sort of goal, but because they had no goals at all. They are by and large the work of a few people and nobody felt like maintaining them. The one exception is Google+, which notably unlike Google Cloud didn't require spending billions of dollars on datacenters and undersea cables, or on hiring/diverting thousands and thousands of engineers. Nor did it require building a third-party partner ecosystem and signing long term contracts with deprecation windows. Nor did it have a projected total market revenue larger than all digital advertising.