[gwern]

> When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy development like GCE and GAE?

As far as I know, never. I've been compiling a list of live and shut down services/products/etc (~299 so far), and while payment doesn't seem to be an important factor (plenty of shut down paid things, including many more advertising services than I expected), I cannot name a service which was under heavy development and was shut down during said development. However, I think that is just because development tends to stop before the final death knell. Reader, for example, used to regularly update and improve during its heyday.

[rattray]

This sounds very interesting -- is it public or can you make it public?

[gwern]

It's not public yet; I haven't finished it (I need to code 4 variables for like 100 entries, since I only thought of the variables partway through assembling the list, and I have 3 or 4 pages to check for additional entries) and the analysis (logistic regression on the variables, and survival curves).

The idea is to try to predict future shut downs, but it's turned out to be a lot more work than I expected...