Yeah and this problem is exacerbated at Google by the relatively easy process of moving between teams. Other companies I was at made this hard. Google encourages it.

When friends complain to me about Google killing projects, they act as if it's upper management making a decision to kill. And that is sometimes the case. But often it's just: nobody wanted to work on it anymore. And Google isn't the kind of "command and control" culture where you crack the whip and tell all your engineers that they're doing X and assign them. At Google they'll just leave your org and move to some other team, and you won't have the power to stop them.

Not saying that's a bad thing, but it has some bad outcomes occasionally.