[resolutebat]

Up and out: launch something, get promoted, move onto the next team, what happens afterwards is the next guy's problem.

And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing.

This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.

[solardev]

I think many companies would keep that kinda stuff internal, though. Google just allows them all to be published publicly and then killed off a few months later. There is really no good reason for 14 different Google chat apps to have become a public meme.

[gtirloni]

And the person that created the product that was canned because nobody used it goes to the new team with their reputation intact and the company ready to give them more money?

[csande17]

Yes. Performance reviews are short-term focused, so by the time the bureaucracy gets around to formally cancelling your old project, it will have probably forgotten that you were the one who created it.

Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".