Comment by ajsnigrutin

Sure, but they've also had tons of products that have run for decades.

After 18 years of living, i'll give you the best view I got:

While I do think Google kills products it shouldn't, my view there tends more towards when things are killed that cost basically nothing to support (IE have 1-2 people working on them, have not large prod costs, and not significant privacy/etc issues over time that require serious engineering rewrites/cost), have lots of happy users, don't meaningfully conflict with some other product strategy, and don't need lots of new features.

When those are killed, I think it's dumb.

Reader falls into this category.

Picasa would not.

lots of things on killedbygoogle do not - i think they were fine to kill, whether the process by which they were killed was a good one or not.

Google+ - eh, there's a lot to hate there but it was also Google experimenting with a more top-down approach to product building. I tend to be a fan of cultural and process experimentation - you have to be able to adapt your culture and processes as a company grows, or you will end up in a really bad place. You will never get this right 100% of the time, and it is worth doing it on important things sometimes, so that the results actually matter.

In this case, G+ also got caught up in the existential crises of the day (social) in a way that was unhelpful overall, and had leadership (Vic) that I think were just not good. He had good folks working for him (Bradley, et al) but I think it would have gone a lot better with someone else in his seat.

I say this as someone who was working on a small product at the time that was slated to become the backend/etc for youtube comments, and got crushed by G+-in-youtube mandates. The Youtube folks were wonderful - happy to figure out what the best thing was, decided to ditch their own thing for ours even though we were a little team (3 people) in a different org, and they were a big team who had spent a bunch of work on comments. They didn't like the top-down G+ mandate anymore than we did. In the end, it wasn't the fact that there was a top-down mandate that was bad. It's that it was not a well thought out strategic mandate.

I do also think Google often doesn't know how to start small and grow a user base over time.

But the rest, i think there is tons of hyperbole around. I think it was fine to kill Picasa - just because some percent doesn't like the replacement doesn't mean it wasn't okay to kill. Part of development and product life cycles is that you are not going to get it right all the time for all people. That's normal.

In the end, they've created products lots of people loved, and have enough users of roughly any product that you can't kill anything without have a large group of unhappy people. The answer to that is not to avoid killing anything. At most, it's "be thoughtful in how you support its death". Sometimes Google learned from its mistakes here, and sometimes it didn't. I had a hand in a number of divestitures and such because of my background and sometimes weird roles, and tried to make sure we did the right thing when I could - previous mistakes were helpful in pushing things for the better.

For example: Sketchup was divested rather than killed, which went really well.

Niantic was also spun off rather than killed, and I think that turned out really well as well.

etc.