[zmmmmm]

I dunno ... Google shuts things down independent of revenue metrics as far as I can tell. They seem to set a bar somewhere around "is this the next Gmail" and if the answer is no they shut it down regardless of how profitable it may be. They want a few giant businesses, not a hundred small ones. I wish they would look at spinning these things out because many of them would make entirely viable independent entities even if not exciting to the HN crowd (revenue/expense neutral, but serving a useful place in the world ...).

[jake_morrison]

My guess is that Google promotes people based on creating a new service, but not taking over an old service and running it / improving it. So when a manager leaves the organization, their service is orphaned: there is nobody to run it, and nobody to fight for it, so they shut it down. Customers and revenue are more or less irrelevant to this calculation.

[londons_explore]

It's basically impossible to spin something that has user data out of Google. To my knowledge, it's never happened.

It's because the user data is all protected under googles privacy policies, and you wouldn't be able to migrate that data to a third party without user consent. The process of asking for consent would harm Google's reputation more than the value of the spun out business. The PR damage is less by just shutting down.

[londons_explore]

Oh, and the actual code of any service is deeply integrated into googles infrastructure. You'd need to do a near full rewrite of many services even to run them in GCP.

[lallysingh]

.. "will this get me promoted or should I work on something new?"

[adonese]

Inbox should have met that metric. I think it is a culture thing, it's far more easier to deprecate any product than to keep supporting it

[dx87]

I'm still mad about Inbox. I moved over to it from Gmail because they said that it was going to be the future of Gmail when it launched. Instead, they abandoned it.

[skinnymuch]

How much of Inbox’s features were moved over to Gmail? Will more be moved over? I never used Inbox.

[roryokane]

Many of Inbox's features were moved over, such as Snoozing emails, but far from all of the features. I doubt they will move over more — if they had wanted to they would have done it when they shut down Inbox.

The biggest feature I miss from Inbox is the integration of TODOs and emails: you could create editable TODOs in your inbox as easily as composing a new email, and when viewing am email thread, you could create a TODO attached to an email thread (e.g. “review the attached document and reply with my feedback”).