I completely agree that a FAANG company would choose to prioritize big problems over small, but the essence of tech these days is how casually they might solve a problem, kill off any startups that might have also been pursuing that problem, and then discard their solution some time later with no regard for the users of that solution or acknowledging the dead startups that didn't have the resources (or will) to compete.
Because a product they have shipped no longer serves the company's interests does not mean it no longer serves the user's interest. And yet these companies casually kill off these things without regard to the impact it has on those users. That lack of empathy, that focus on what is good for the company and company employee's who focus on what is good for them, is the narcissism here.
I was trying to talk in the more "general" sense than the specific sense. A company with empathy would never have shipped the music service in the first place if it didn't intend to support it as a product going forward and with an end of life strategy that accommodated the users who adopted it. To illustrate with an example:
Non-narcissistic company:
We have this thing which manages a music library, it isn't part of our core mission but it is likely useful to people.
Okay, put together a plan for sunsetting it if it turns out that it doesn't make sense to support it. Then when you launch it, make sure people know what will happen in the event we decide to end of life the product.
Launch product, ... time passes .. then sunset it. Activate the sunsetting plan.
Nobody is surprised, the plans were already in place and the users already knew what would happen if it came to this, they feel sad but they knew this was something that could happen.
Narcissistic company:
Hey we got this thing which works and is trendy, it manages a music library and it will poke our competitor in the eye because they think they have a monopoly on managing peoples music. Should we ship it?
Hell yeah! Let's hype the hell out of it and really make competitor look bad. They will waste so much time and effort trying to figure out how to respond!
Launch product ... time passes ...
Hey, that thing we launched still costs us money and the competitor has long since moved to a subscription service which we can't do and nobody in the company wants to work on this dog cuz its old and tired anyway.
Okay, take it behind the barn and shoot it. Turn off the servers and free them up for other things we can use to get good press!
But the users?
Oh people still use this crap? Tell you what refund them what they paid, hahahahahahahahahahahaha. That was so funny. Yeah, like we owe them anything. Just turn off the damn servers, there are like six really interesting things with lots of buzz words we could be showing off with those machines and storage.
That's a catch-22. You have to be pretty big to be able to license this stuff at all.
Yes and no. I would argue that small projects are a misalignment of resources for FAANG companies. For example, niche music streaming services are better left to smaller startups who can easily solve those problems.
FAANGs should allocate their resources on big problems that others would not have the resources to tackle. Because if the FAANGs don't, no one else would be able to feasibly attack those problems.
The upside is the big problems get solved and there's smaller problems left on the table for startups to flourish on.