[kouohhashi]

Let employees to start new projects and shut it down later if it does not seem to be profitable. This strategy just make sense. But I just want google to make the works open sourced when abandoned. I hope google opensource Duplex for web...

[rippercushions]

By and large Google can't open source anything internal even if they wanted to, because it's so closely tied into Google's own ecosystem (Borg etc) that it's useless outside it.

[romwell]

>Let employees to start new projects and shut it down later if it does not seem to be profitable.

That's not the strategy though.

The strategy is "I'll get promotion for launching, not maintaining" for employees, and "we're still making a shit ton of money, so why bother" from the top brass.

[nowherebeen]

No one gets a promotion from fixing bugs mentality.

[bruce511]

Strategy leads to winning the big picture. And Google is not doing that. They are the King's of advertising, but move outside that stream and it becomes "when" not "if" it'll get the chop.

This leads to a lack of trust, so things like GCP suffer. Regardless of the technical merits, or price, I can never use GCP because I don't trust Google. This is largely due to their willingness to kill things, coupled with a lack of phone support.

Incidentally lots of the things shut down were successful, and profitable, by most company standards. Just not by google-scale standards.