[csallen]

I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs.

But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating.

I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then.

They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.

[janalsncm]

It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.

[csallen]

Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money.

I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.

[bonesss]

The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial.

It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations).

Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue.

Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.

[csallen]

Yes, but this is exactly my point. You can't perfectly calculate exactly how much revenue is lost due to breaking trust with users because you repeatedly sunset projects that they've relied on.

Maybe if Google had those support engineers on Google+ for 5 years generating $X, that would've created enough trust that Gemini could now generate $4X.

[janalsncm]

It’s also hard to estimate the lost revenue from projects which aren’t started because your staff is busy maintaining legacy projects.

[csallen]

Sure, but I don't think Google's primary issue is that they aren't starting enough projects.