Microsoft is religious about maintaining backward compatibility and support. They also have some concept of service, which makes cancellations smoother. (All this makes product development aware of the costs of abandonment. Google doesn’t have that in its culture, and it’s a constant problem with hiring from them now.)
Microsoft tells you the dog is going to "Aunt Joy Ann's farm" and gives you a puppy.
Google blasts the dog right in front of you and leaves you to bury the poor thing.
Which of the "products" on _this list_ was shut down badly, in comparison to what MS would do? Not products on some other list, but this list that's at the top of the front page.
Code Jam was not a product. Stadia refunded all purchases. Street View is still accessible from the Maps app, this is just removing some ancient standalone app that nobody had heard of. Currents and the wifi routers had long deprecation cycles. I bet nobody here knows anything about the wearable computing stuff or how it was shut down.
If these are all products that were reasonable to shut down, and were shut down reasonably well, then what's newsworthy about this?
Nobody who developed for Stadia thinks this. And this is far from a HN view—it regularly comes up at conferences for financial types.
If there were no users buying games, shutting it down would not have had any meaningful impact on the developers.
How do you think they should have done it instead? What would have changed for those developers when done your way?
Launched it as a start-up with unfair access to Google's resources. There was no way for it to work under Google's aegis.
Obviously it was not a well launched product, but that's what you get when you hire Phil Harrison.
I'm broadly criticizing Google's ability to launch and maintain products. Launching fucked products falls under this umbrella. The point is betting on Google with your own resources is a bad idea.
My apologies, I should have realized you were not actually replying to that point in any way and just making another generic "Google cancel everything lol" argument.
So it comes back to the question that ed_mercer had: why is there such a double standard? Why does somebody obsessively maintain that site, and why does a large part of the HN audience love spamming "when will Google cancel search lol" into any discussion about Google, when Amazon putting two bullets into the neck of yet another product goes unnoticed?