[awill]

Good take. This made me thing of all the GOogle failures in a different light. It isn't just that they abandon users. They also crush competitors in the initial phase (by being free, or generally having Google branding), only to pull the plug. We often talk about the users left with having to find an alternative, but not the competitors they crushed along the way.

[asah]

In ads and commerce, Google has much longer time horizon... e.g. froogle was launched in 2002 and they rebranded and "turned on the spigot" in 2012.