Nah, my analogy between a kid or a car is that if you get thing that is meant to be decently long term, car at least a year or a kid at least 18 years, you wouldn't give up in 3 months. There's not many things a person would own or have that giving up in 3 months wouldn't see like ditching it. Even giving up a cell phone in 3 months is pretty daft

> Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

In the same way that when a child is adopted, it instantly dies?

When you are Google, you have millions in funding, almost unlimited engineering ressources, political connections and many good reasons why a project would be successful (journalists, audience, users, accounts, etc)

Once you transfer the responsibilities; all of the support that kept the project stay afloat disappears. It's not sustainable anymore, there is much limited growth, all the business model for exploiting data for advertising cannot exist anymore, etc.

Well, it's dead you know.

Products often die when transferred to another organisation. They never say that they will die in the announcement.

See https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

It's entirely reasonable for people to assume this is basically Google shutting down the free WiFi service but with extra steps.

Depends if the project continues to use google branding or has a “built by google” tagged on to it in order to mislead customers that it is still somehow maintained by them.

If you owned it for 3 months, I'd think you were nuts.

Notice that you had to add "in the woods" to make it clear that ditching is negative here.