Incidentally, I think this is the best way to start a business if you ever find yourself in the right position. Big companies are ditching / spinning off successful products which are just not "successful enough" and you can often pick them up for the cost of supporting existing customers.
I surely would hope that the same think had happened to several of the Google services that were killed a short time ago; specially Wave and Code Search.
Although I know that at least Wave was made given to Apache, I think what that needed was a company that was willing to polish and provide the service.
1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't have if you're not Google.
2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a profitable business off much harder.
Not necessarily. At least with Google Wave [1], Google ensured that they made the necessary modifications to allow users to run Wave servers by themselves. There is at least one provider running wave-in-a-box [2], and there isn't any reason that this provider should be the only one.
>2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a profitable business off much harder.
Harder yes, but it's still well short of impossible. I was thinking that the Wave Federation Protocol could perhaps be monetized as a shared-editing/collaboration service. It could be positioned as a combination of Sharepoint and chat.
[1] http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...
In the case of Wave, there was a major gap between the product being declared EOL from Google and until the various bits and pieces for running Wave as an independent vendor was in place - and in that gap all reasonable people ran away, so non-Google Wave offerings are starting from scratch.
As for money, no, certainly not impossible, but it's one more hurdle to hitting the ground running.