What exactly is considered a success here? That it lives on for at least a decade? More than N active users per month?
I think the reason they graveyard so many products is because their line of "successful" is much higher than what a scrappy startup would consider success. So even products with thousands of active users would be put to their death bed instead of iterated upon.
Everything else is just icing / data harvesting.
Begin still available?
Maybe the Pixel phone is a success story?
So where can I buy the original Pixel, new, with warranty, and with the latest software? I can't, because new version have come out since, just like, for example, Google's chat applications have been "killed", but a new version has always been made
Pixel is a line of hardware products, and to stay competitive in Google's target market, new hardware releases are essentially necessary. Likewise the common thinking in the industry (correct or not, and most likely case-by-case) is that keeping production of older models up and running isn't viable. That's the same reason you can't get first-gen iPhones anymore.
With software, you have the benefit of not having to scrap the entire product at once -- you can keep the sites, domains, brand, whatever -- and because the vast majority of users on something like Hangouts used the official client, you could get away with arbitrary API and interface changes without losing (nearly as much) brand momentum.
What is not necessary is to prevent users from using old hardware by closing the drivers and not giving the specs.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see drivers getting open sourced when they're going out of support, but on its own, not doing so isn't preventing people from using old hardware in most cases.
In any case, in your opinion, does a successful hardware product have to open-source its drivers and specs at EOL? Is any other hardware product a failure by that metric?
They become very insecure without any possibility to fix that.
> does a successful hardware product have to open-source its drivers and specs at EOL?
Successful from the point of view of the consumer, yes.