[animationwill]

>> Is product success a useful metric for whether or not Google cancel services?

Yes. Unsuccessful products get cancelled.

The successful services get to stay but the customers get hit with "insane price hikes":

https://www.geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-go...

[treesknees]

Except for Reader, Inbox, Cloud Print, the Nest API, Code, among many others I'm sure. It doesn't seem to matter whether they're successful or popular.

[tehlike]

I was a big reader person, but google is victim of its own success. These products were barely above a few million users. At google scale,1% is more than 15m person, and usually 1% is not justifiable