The only reason that Google can throw stuff against the wall and scale it immediately is because they have the infrastructure in place.

I can’t imagine you can decouple Googke’s products from their infrastructure.

Picassa? Could have open sourced it. There are a few others in the graveyard that were easily able to live on any infrastructure.

How do you know how much of Picasa’s code was intertwined with Google’s? Could it have been a profitable in going concern by itself? How?

It's traditional software, it runs offline, client side. Which is great for low bandwidth places and the privacy concious. It has some basic ML for face recog. The money is in photo printing, which is a pretty big industry which Google has failed to capture any of.

It had a huge installed base, but of course Google would not sell user engagement in bulk, only in tiny pieces as ads. Advertising the things people take photos of is pretty straightforward too, another reason why Google killed Picasa instead of letting it free.

I strongly suspect that it would generally be a massive undertaking to decouple products from their internal ecosystem and render them able to be spun off.

They did it with Sketchup I guess.

But that was also an acquisition, so I guess it lifted out of Google's infrastructure more easily.