I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth.
But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.
There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.
All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)
You can build a very solid business empire on a large collection of small offerings.
Re:Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
by bariswheel on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @09:13PM
(#38388367)
Though one key issue: Winning hearts and minds matter, public perception matters, they do indirectly affect the bottom line. Requires some nuance/between the lines sight to see this.
I don't get this.
Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion)
If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those projects would not conflict with their current main activities being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's not that budget for existing depts would have to be reduced...).