I really, really doubt it; Google has never killed a product that it created or acquired to serve as a complement to enterprise Ads/Analytics usage.

Google kills plenty of its consumer products if they don’t catch on in a big way (Reader, Google+); and it certainly “transitions” developer-targeted product/service startups into plain features (Firebase, WordLens, etc.) But this is neither—it’s BI software, for enterprise customers who build it deeply into their decision-making in the same way they build Google Analytics itself into their decision-making. These are not the people even Google wants to make mad. They’re precisely the people writing the checks which make up the majority of Google’s ad revenue!

That's not correct... Wildfire and Adometry are two examples of products on the ads and analytics space that were killed after acquisition.

> and it certainly “transitions” developer-targeted product/service startups into plain features (Firebase, WordLens, etc.

They recently killed "Works with Nest" in favour of an Assistant-backed API that doesn't currently implement what Google acknowledges to be the most popular features of "Works with Nest".

Google are more than willing to kill developer-oriented as consumer-oriented.

Nest is a consumer brand that sells consumer products.

The Nest wasn't shelved though, it was the developer API that got the half-hearted approach.

Works with Nest had issues.

Just like Stackdriver (acquired in 2014)?

Seriously, it seems like Looker is filling a specific hole in the Google Cloud offering.

stackdriver works nicely for all resources in the Google Ecosystem - isn't it what Google would want?

Thats definitely the wrong read. This is a direct competitor to Microsoft's PowerBI. Google will need Looker to get large enterprise data management deals on Google Cloud.