Does this behavior of constantly killing products not cause other users to avoid their offerings?
It is certainly a hinderance to the adoption of their cloud services. They have not yet shown they are in it for the long haul.
And Gmail is best used with your own domain (@example.com, not @gmail.com). That way when they do kick you off you can use your offline back of messages and repoint some MX records.
Did you know Google has hundreds of branded product offerings, so say 12 closures per year is something like 2%, i.e. a 25 year median horizon (=1/.02/2)? https://developers.google.com/products
What period of support would satisfy you? For a "fast fashion/art" vignette like Poly?
Isn't it fun to have ephemeral experiences? You can choose to embrace that aspect of life rather than chastise it, it's all your choice.
Yes a person has to be pretty savvy to avoid building their business on an unstable a Google product, but all fundamental business choices need to be savvy. Let's experiment, move fast, break things, and try out the unstable Google offerings and see how it goes. Or let's do the sure choice and pick only Google Cloud products 8+ years mature. There's an appetite and big market for both which Google can fill, and the mature senior developer can well care for him- or herself.
I'd rather the megacorp allocate our capital towards experiments than not. I'd rather the megacorp keep some of its founding character than do the soulless bluechip strategy of having 50% of its operating budget be selling & marketing expenses for stale maintenance-mode products (not exaggerating, look at some public company financials like Salesforce, which actually I admire lately for their innovation by acquisition).
I like variety. I like fewer restrictions and fewer flavor-of-the-decade norms on self-expression. These are popular values, and I thank Google for materializing them for its employees and consumers.
I wouldn’t put a big effort into something that relied on a niche google product, but it’s not like maps dispersing would be anything but a momentary inconvenience. I don’t seek to “punish” by not using its products.
I like to use Apple Maps via CarPlay when navigating because the visuals and UX seem nicer, but push comes to shove, if I'm trying to navigate to somewhere new, hard to find, or worried about traffic, I find Google Maps is still the superior product by far.
I guess it depends on your particular usage of these apps. Gmail is my primary email so I'd miss it too if it went away, but I'd be able to transition over to say, hotmail/outlook or some other webmail service without too much disruption. Google Maps going away on the other hand, would be highly disruptive to me.
How much effort would it really be for one of the large pornography companies to make a general purpose youtube clone? I bet a viable MVP would only take a few days if they were properly motivated.
I like having access to these experiments. This site is literally a free 3d-object hosting website. I pay nothing, so why should I expect stability, lifetime access, etc. etc. all of which cost money?
Google couldn't monetize this, but maybe someone else can. Google was the first to do an office suite in the cloud. Now there is Notion, Airtable, etc. all of which exist because Google was willing to put its experiments online.
And yes, they mine and scrape all the data from these experiments to fuel their other paid services and ad engine, I know, but still I prefer access to these experiments. They're often ahead of the curve, and no other company is going to be able to offer all these things.
I'm not a Google fanboy at all, but I don't mind if they shut down free "products" like this if the tradeoff is that we get to see and use new, innovative products earlier. We all benefit from seeing what's possible. Applies to lots of products: Stadia, Drive, Maps, etc,
The were the first to get big, maybe, but not the first period. The Google Docs word processor was built from the ashes of Writely, which they acquired back when Ajax was a new buzzword.