> We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners.

Even 10 years ago they've been very explicit about this strategy internally. Management talks about it as "putting more wood behind fewer arrows".

Its somewhat self reinforcing. I didn't try Google Inbox because I was sure it would be axed in a couple years anyway. (And I was right.) The more people make that same assumption, the fewer people try anything new from Google. And the worse any new products' metrics are - which in turn makes google axe more otherwise good products.