Google killing non successful products is the right move
There are countless complaints about Google killing products – there’s even a website killedbygoogle.com for this 😅. Engineers are especially quick to call out how Google leadership is making a mistake and are out of touch. My 2 cents is that Google is most of the time right to kill these products.
Google has limited resources whether these are staffing or machine resources – and yes machines are not unlimited, it takes a decade to bring up a datacenter and multiple cloud providers are under crunch today to bring up more datacenters. From there, if a project doesn’t meet a bar high enough (e.g. in revenue), these resources can be relocated for another effort.
The concern around people not trusting Google because they shut down products too much is weak in my opinion:
- From a rationale point of view, Google is as (or less!) likely to shut down products than another smaller companies – e.g. they don’t have cash liquidity risks
- Google is a stable company by itself, so people connect other products back to the search engine, Gmail, etc. – which gives the impression of a stable company despite small products being turned down. My theory is that engineers are more prone to remember these changes as the deprecation of API/service might impact their actual work (maybe they’ll have to migrate to alternative services). My experience is that I never heard a non technical person complain about Google shutting down products.
- For what it’s worth (maybe because of the concerns mentioned above), Google got better at turning down products – I think the Stadia shut down was as good as it could be, they made a reasonable effort to not brick the hardware and refunded a bunch of stuff.
Last but not least, Google is still a company whose sole purpose is to generate profits – it doesn’t exist to make the world a better place (it may do it only because it aligns with generating revenue).