But everyone I know still uses Google search and Chrome. Most use Gmail. Schools still give students Chromebooks and teach them Google Docs.
I think Google will be fine.
There is nothing wrong with a company testing and shutting down new products. There is a problem when you say this is Google _______ or Facebook _______ and your customers think it is on the same level as your first tier apps. Amazon does it all the time and most users never know it was an Amazon product. Most users don’t even know Instagram is owned by Facebook.
Consider the exhaustive work Microsoft has done for decades to make things backwards compatible, often at the cost of their current product. No one would expect that from Google. They expect things to be killed off arbitrarily when the product isn’t popular enough.
There are options:
Sell the product to another company
Publish the source code with an open license
Or never stamp your name on the product in the first place
The tech-savvy community was on Google years before the general public, and them leaving Google should set your expectations for what happens with everyone else a few years after that.
As a techie who has set up and/or fixed many non-techie family & friends' computers and devices, I hear ya. 110%, loud and clear. :-)
However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.
It's not hard to buy a phone or Chromebook online, log into your Google account and be ready to go.
It's not like the old days when you would have to go to your grandma's house and install a better web browser, antivirus, etc. Most things just work now, for most people.
If the Google products change too much, the curriculum will become so wrong as to be unusable. My school taught me Microsoft Word with outdated versions on outdated computers; but that was OK because the book matched the computers; when you eventually run into a more recent Word, you have to dig around to find where they moved the menus and controls, but the core concepts still work. With Google's tendency to move stuff around willy-nilly, I expect the curriculum to become unusably stale --- once you have the core concepts, you can search them out; but if you're still learning, it's really hard when step a of every step in the process is find where they moved the things you're being taught.
They make excellent products, but they just don't want to invest in them long enough to gain widespread appeal. Inbox was a killer app. Now that I've experienced what brilliant email looks like, I'm going to keep a look out for a competing clone and will likely switch.
It's a vicious cycle. Fewer people will invest in new products until they know it will be around in the future, but then Google will shut down product that don't gain enough users. This is a cancer that slowly eats away at the company bottom line.
None of these are concerns with either Google's online offerings or the offerings of most startups.