A company that never encourages or rewards fixing things, but does reward making new things is bound to produce many versions of the same thing. How many chat systems does google have? And how many dozens more have they already killed?
There can be a lot of value in rebuilding the same things from the ground up. There'll always be differences and novel things that people earlier hadn't seen. Of course it's costly and disruptive because you kill a lot of stuff, but especially in software building new things is relatively fast.
People will always complain about companies that kill a lot of products or software but at the end of the day they get more chances to build things from the ground up.
If you create a product then there is an external cost borne by the users who need to use it. And then if you replace that product with some other product, those users need to retrain.
It's really easy to create a new product, but it is a commitment for someone else to adopt it. And just because the cost is externalised, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Maybe there is value for managers (who got promotions) and programmers (who got promotions and learned something), but for Google there is no value at all - it losts its users.
I remember everyone using gmail chat.. that they "remade" (killed) like two times.
Everyone just moved on.
Also I dont understand why investors arent unhappy with that. Google can still earn hundreds of millions on chat. Those wont be billions, but it is still money. And "hudred million here, hundred million there" start to add up.
I expect, for example, that it is vastly more efficient to send a known datastructure over the wire in FIDL, but it is vastly more efficient to parse, modify/extend a repeated subfield, and then reserialize a protobuf.
You can't "fix" a system to achieve two goals that are in conflict, sometimes it is in fact better to have N opinionated systems, than one that is only okay at everything.
That said, there are certainly many design decisions that FIDL does do differently because the constraints of the problems it tries to solve are different as you mention.
Looks like "structs" you can only remove boxed fields by setting their references to null, but not add fields.
* Google+ (rip)
* Google Allo
* Google Chat
* Google Groups (separate from Google's Usenet service)
* Google Hangouts
* Google Messenger
* Google Duo
* SMS via Google Project Fi
* Google Voice
> And how many dozens more have they already killed?
Too many: https://killedbygoogle.com/