Google has already pulled six products in 2023

Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions.

Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service.

Sure, you can blame part of it on the promo culture encouraging people to move to new and shiny projects, and part of it on the fact that we release a lot more experimental stuff than you see at more established companies, but there's also plenty of cases where there was exactly one person who understood the codebase and was keeping the product running, and said person is no longer at the company for one reason or another.

In my opinion, Bard should never have been released in its current state, but, that's leadership for you.

I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what.

The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks).

Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.

"This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said. "

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

I don't get the reasoning behind this article. Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree. The article feels like blogspam riding on the hypetrain of people disliking when google discontinues products like Stadia.