So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another year before it's taken behind the shed.
Depreciation schedules for cloud services are one thing. Consumer products are another.
They lack the ability to commit to a space and cultivate it, casually changing course on a whim and leaving masses of people spinning in their wake. Just look at how they've managed YouTube and its guidelines, bans, etc. Or the Play Store and all of its debacles. Were I a game developer, I would never want to be beholden to a Google gaming platform.
Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702
That's because states, entrenched providers and in some cases local governments made every inch of work cost a mile of time. The cost was making Fiber a non-starter... ISP's benefited from nationwide networks largely funded by governments, then used their monopoly influence to prevent any competition, and "hired" state governments to enforce their monopolies.
But we can hand-wave all of that away and claim it was Google's lack of commitment.
This is closer to their existing product portfolio, it doesn't have nearly as a difficult upstart cost relative to Fiber, and the business models are pretty clear. I think a closer analog would be the rumored reductions in their hardware division, but given that they're still making successful hardware + software, it could be more about reorganizing around priorities than it is an indication of their reduced investment
It’s not like a photo site where you can just download your content. Whatever is built to run on Stadia will not run on your home machine or anywhere else.
1. Release a product, make it decently good.
2. Kill it in a few years after it has gotten widely adopted.
3. Release an alternative product that does the same thing, but, a lot of times, worse than the original and/or with missing functionality from the old one that people actually care about.
4. Bonus step: make it really confusing (looking at you, Hangouts => Allo/Duo).
5. Repeat the cycle.
Notable examples of it that come to mind:
* Messaging: GChat => Hangouts => Allo/Duo => I got tired of keeping up with that they are pushing now
* Music streaming: Google Music => Google Play Music [just a rename, I think] => YouTube Remix => YouTube Music
* First party Android experience: Google Play Edition => [I feel like I am missing something in-between here] => Android One + Android Go
GPE -> Android Go does not fit the mold of the "cycle" you're talking about. Further, Android Go is substantially better than Android One.
Do you have any other examples?
As for others, I personally stopped using non-essential google products (i.e., the ones I believe that Google is unlikely to screw up without completely destroying faith in the company, like GMail or Maps), so I can't come up with anything. If you are curious, you can check out https://killedbygoogle.com/ and see if there is anything there that might fit the bill.
Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with that website. I found it by trying to look up a list of killed off Google products, hoping it would bring up some memories. Then I realized that there are way too many products on the list for me to parse through, and the website has a nice and clean UI/UX that I am not ashamed to share here.
Cloud gaming needs a killer multiplayer game that requires massive parallel compute (thus it can't be run locally) to make a case for sticking around.