It's likely not google get bored, but users didn't adapt product on large enough scale.
[edit] oh, and maps!
I wonder if any regulations around phone numbers is actually what it protecting Voice from getting nuked from CEO orbit.
Reader/iGoogle didn't have ads, but stopped you from visiting places that did have ads.
Inbox didn't have ads, but was directly pulling users away from gmail which does.
Docs was an acquisition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets,_and_Slide...
What exactly is a "large enough scale"?
The mentality that a project is a failure unless it achieves exponential growth and massive world-eating scale needs to die in a fire.
Even small things have value, and one of the few good things about massive corporations is they have the resources to do a lot small things well. When you have 85,000 employees, focus is overrated.
probably less than half of them are engineers, and about 20% of them are capable to build complex systems. And now Google has quite long list of technologically complex products: search, ads, youtube, android. I think density of complex projects per capita may be much higher at Google than in other companies.
I like to think I understand the sentiment, but I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that.
Inbox and GMail in all likeliness are in the same product area (PA) and thus at some point in the chain they report to the same person.
That being the case, if Inbox takes even 1/2 the time of this manager that GMail takes, then it's really not worth it because GMail easily has more than 10x the users.
My guess is that they will try to take all the things people liked about Inbox and bring them to GMail over time. They probably want to shut down Inbox before that happens so they can use more engineering resources to make that transition more quickly and also so that the tech stack is simpler by not having to support two different products.
That's as clear a sign as you can expect that users don't want Inbox, notwithstanding a noisy minority like us.
I was also extremely hesitant because of Google's history of canning experimental apps and Inbox simply isn't integral enough to be safe from the routine culling (unlike e.g. Chrome or Maps).
I was an early adopter for Wave (which ended up going nowhere because nobody I knew wanted to give it a try and I didn't have enough invites to hand them out without knowing people would use them). I tried to get on Orkut but never got an invite (until it had already basically become the "Facebook of South America"). I strongly believed in Google+ as a potential Facebook killer and used it early on. I was also an avid user of Reader in the Web 2.0 days.
At this point, I no longer trust new Google products. Google seems to really want me to use Duo, for example, but nobody I know is eager to use it and I won't talk my friends into using it if it's not clear that it's here to stay. I'm not committing to any Google product if I don't have reason to believe they won't pull the rug whenever they please.
Not to dismiss the rest of your point which is totally valid and a well deserved criticism, but you can use Duo to call people with Android phones even if they don't have Duo, so you don't actually need to convince them to use it.
Because users know it wont be a product that gets any updates and will be shutdown in 2 years.