[kmeisthax]

> Oddly, maybe even with less effort than shutting it down would take.

Google has a number of internal processes that effectively make it impossible to run legacy code without an engineering team just to integrate breaking upstream API changes, of which there are many. Imagine Google as an OS, and every few years you need to upgrade from, say, Google 8 to Google 9, and there's zero API or ABI stability so you have to rewrite every app built on Google. Everyone is on an upgrade treadmill. And you can't decide not to get on that treadmill either because everything built at Google is expected to launch at scale on Google's shitty[0]-ass infrastructure.

[0] In the same sense that Intel's EDA tools were absolutely fantastic when they made them and are holding the company back now

[hirsin]

The worst case is when this mentality of "just update your code" leaks out to the rest of us. I'm still scarred from some of the samesite shenanigans, breaking useful (not ads) boxed software because they figured everyone on the internet could "just update" their websites within six months of them putting out a dev blog post.

It's just not an accurate view of how the world works.