Google is a business - they are neither a kindly old wizard doing things for the good of the people, nor are they a game show wheel, randomly picking a product to kill today.

You can pretty accurately model what they will and won't do with this one unusual insight that they're a business.

For instance: are they going to kill Chrome? No, Chrome has given them market dominance as well as a seat at the table to define web standards, improving and shaping the web platform both to be a more appealing product to developers and users, so that they can make more money when they stick ads on it, and to more easily support sticking ads on it. Or, briefly, Chrome - though it's not a paid product per se - makes them huge amounts of money.

What about (from that website) Google Currents? It's the rebranded, corporate-only version of Google+. Its biggest user was almost certainly Google itself, and it was a venue for employee activism and therefore was a threat to corporate profit. Briefly, though it was a paid product, they had few paying users and it cost them money.

A sibling comment mentions the end of legacy free G Suite (formerly GAFYD) accounts for very small users. This was, by definition, a thing that didn't make them money and a thing that was hardly an on-ramp for subscriptions that did make them money. Again, you could predict this.

So what abut Chrome OS Flex? It remains to be seen - it's not as clearly worthwhile as Chrome or even Chrome OS itself. But Google does absolutely make money on Chrome OS Enterprise, which this product is clearly linked with. It's nowhere in the same boat as things they provided out of the kindness of their corporate-personhood heart like legacy free G Suite or Google Reader.

It might end up being a failed experiment, certainly. But "It's a Google product" is a weak signal about whether it's going to get killed, and there are many stronger signals. Let me know when they kill Ads and Cloud.

Lately with the G Suite announcement it has felt more like a massacre. Who cares about Google Currents shutting down, when we have already learned not to touch new Google products like Duo, Hangouts, Meet or whatever they are named.

What G Suite announcement? That they changed the name?

The one where the free GSuite accounts, that they discontinued 10 years ago, were now going to be converted and you'd have to pay for them. They didn't "massacre" anything, it was already done a decade ago.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?product_name=UnuFl...

Translation: lots of cheap 2nd hand Chromebooks/boxes to unlock and flash with an open OS.

https://mrchromebox.tech/

if you don't try, you don't exist

they should be proud to have such a page

do you have yours? oh sorry, you don't even try

If you keep killing products quickly after launch, people will hesitate to invest in your products. This is also a problem with startups. I need a problem solved, not be part your incredible journey.

Undoubtedly there remain issues with Eric Schmidt style 'let a thousand flowers bloom' approach to product development, though, there is some upside to it, too (gmail, for ex). That said, I doubt the list on killedbygoogle.com parroted around as a badge of honour of having tried even if failed, is one of them... cognitive dissonance be damned.