(Edit: what's the objection to this comment? Usually I can tell, here I have no idea)
But I'm not personally looking to use anything _new_ that Google makes. Wave, reader, goofke+, hangouts, and a bunch of others came and went. Basically when compared to behemoths like search and Gmail most really good things are complete failures.
Unfortunately this reputation is starting to ge an issue outside, and inside, the company. Outside I'm personally reluctant to use anything "Google new". I can imagine that inside when you're working on your 3rd or 4th cancelled Google project, you passion is, well, dulled.
Like yes, Google is probably not going to kill GCP. But it's not doing very well compared to Amazon, and then there's no guarantee that any product within GCP is going to exist for the long run. To think that a major part of your cloud infrastructure might just be dropped, that makes it too risky for me personally.
There's a general expectation that if I'm going to take a risk on a product, that they're in it for the long haul. Google is too big to be "in for the long haul" on really anything except their core products.
Obviously damage to the brand does not mean their users will immediately go to zero. You can see the damage to their brand that their project cancellation strategy causes in nerd forums like this all the time. Now probably that's not a big concern in the large scheme and they've decided the impact is reasonable, but if people think public moves like these are not considered carefully considered in this light, they just don't have a grasp of the reality of how corporations manage an asset worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
And the idea that because the balance may not be hurting them now, that the marginal costs and benefits for increasing the number of projects and project failures remain static and therefore increasing them can only help, is just laughable, and you don't need an economics degree to figure that out.
So I try to give the benefit of the doubt and give the benefit of the doubt even this kind of cheap rhetorical device and illogical point, but it's hard to imagine someone actually thought they were making a good point.
That’s why assumed it wasn’t sarcastic. As a sarcastic comment it feels flippant and dismissive. So I thought a better perspective was that they were referencing Google’s social and messaging products.
I have no way to know but fortunately, it matters not.