And is it anymore than other big corporation? That pages lists 24 products, which doesn't seem that much to me. There have been plenty of stories about retired products at FB, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc.

Im not disputing that Google does this, but ever since Google Reader was stopped this has become a stock comment on basically every HN discussion on Google products (other than search & ads) and has long ceased to have any value at all, and seems to be just accepted as some gospel without any evidence that this is a bigger problem with Google than the other tech giants.