try new things under a different brand name that doesn't taint everything related to Google if you want to experiment

Google shutting down consumer products hurts Google Cloud in many developer's minds. Doesn't help that Google Cloud itself just as frivolously deprecates products or APIs that people build their businesses on. And customer support is equally terrible across the company

Examples of Google Cloud sunsetting products? As far as I know it's very rare that they do that.

Killing consumer products, and quite possibly launching products that flop in the first place, or their failure to make their consumer products appealing over time, really rubs off on Google Cloud though, you have to keep repeating to yourself that Google rarely kills its Enterprise offerings

Edit: not to say anything about Workspace, you can be essentially shut down for nothing. But there's a wider problem of major email providers behaving like a cartel in basically only accepting email from one another.

Their IoT platform last month - https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/google-cloud-will-shutter-...

several other examples as well, but the worst thing they do is very frequent breaking API changes which force companies to do maintenance work to adjust to Google

I believe you when you say they play fast and loose with the APIs. I've mostly suffered from the lacking documentation for the SDKs, they are often autogenerated and just plopped out there, with mutually contradictory sets of documentation scattered around the web.