[plorkyeran]

The officially given reason for shutting down Google Code was that it was never intended to be a product and was just a community service thing that they did because SourceForge had ceased to be a reasonable place to host open source projects. Once a bunch of other forges popped up (including but not limited to Github) there was no longer any real need for it.

I thought it sounded pretty plausible for that era of Google.

[astrange]

I knew someone who worked on it at the time, and he was also convinced they could use it to force people to use the super-slow feature-lacking Mercurial, and was personally hurt that everyone wanted to use git instead because it let you rebase things.