Can you show me statistically that Google is any more likely to discontinue something than any other startup? Or than Apple or Amazon?
A few people got upset about Google discontinuing Reader, but that was a looong time ago. And they've certainly discontinued other things to... but just like every other company.
They seem to discontinue a lot of products, including ones with fairly large user bases. It seems like a valid concern if you're going to try to build something on top of their stuff.
Disclaimer: I work at Google.
It's a major issue for actual deployments of hardware in e.g. medical, education, research settings where a machine may end up supporting a piece of machinery for a couple decades on no support but just some spare duplicate parts that can be swapped in.
I once used a fiber optic splicer at MIT that was 2.5 decades old and ran DOS. Nobody gave a crap that it was DOS. We just needed fibers spliced and a new shiny touch screen splicer would cost $30K.
This however seems to be a product with no SLA and no guarantees, outside of the cloud offerings etc. I kinda agree with OP, Google's track record is bad when it comes to this kind of products.
And yes I think they are worse than other companies. Google isn't a hardware company, so they're worse than apple in that regard. And Amazon would do it through AWS, which would also make this fall inside their core competency.
[1]: https://killedbygoogle.com
[2]: https://gcemetery.co