Comment by TheDong

idk, google has a nice list of things that seem like they'll never be profitable, but it keeps running em. Like, google patents, google books, google translate... none of those make money, right? Chromium only makes money indirectly I think, and they invest a ton of engineering resources in that.

Google kills stuff, but they don't kill everything, just stuff that no one is working on (like google reader, I think all the people who cared about the code just quit), or stuff that is specifically counter to some exec's strategy (like killing a bunch of chat software to centralize on Google+ or whatever it is now)