Has Google ever killed an acquisition or product of Github's scale? Most products that come to mind were niche things like iGoogle, or things that got deprecated/integrated into other products, e.g. Buzz, Wave, Picasa

Google Reader is the product that seems to leave the most bitterness, but that too seems to have been relatively niche.

Google killed Google Code in 2016 and moved much of their code base to Github. Maybe they'll rebrand Github back to "Code", but outright killing it seems unlikely.

Github is a niche product. Average people do not use it at all, its utility value is entirely niche. The average person will never know what Github is or what it does. It's useful to less than 2% of the US population, and less than 0.5% of the global population.

They've killed / destroyed / butchered large acquisitions before, yes.

Metaweb / Freebase cost them a reported $200-$300 million.

Feedburner cost them $100 million.

Slide.com cost them $228 million.

Motorola was a $12 billion disaster. They might as well have killed it.

DailyDeal cost them $114 million.

Wildfire Interactive cost them $450 million.

There are a couple dozen more in the $30m to $100m range.

Google Reader

Please no. I spent months to find strategies to limit my google product usage between mails, search, phone, calendar, contacts, maps, streaming, dns, adsense, cdn and analytics. It's a struggle. They are everywhere. I really hope they don't eat github too.

>Google is notorious for killing products too, though. For me, much of the same rationale would apply

Agreed. The best possible solution for making GitHub long term sustainable would be following the Mozilla model.

I mean the other option is to just not sell and if money is a problem adjust pricing. I find their plans to be incredibly cheap for what they offer so they definitely could have room to grow in that regard.