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Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

My gut reaction: it looks great! Also, there is no way I’d use it unless Google committed to not killing it off for at least five years.

I don’t mind trying experimental personal tools, but I really don’t want to get a whole team of people reliant on this thing, just to see it get cancelled like the hundreds of other projects Google has killed over the years.

A paid support option would be nice too - I think I saw something about a paid “support for ANY Google product” option earlier this year but I can’t find it just now.

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I believe it's "Google One" - https://one.google.com/about/support

https://cloud.google.com/support It's not ANY, but it's all GSuite/GCP products.

Is it even remotely possible that Google would sell discontinued products to other entities, e.g. raise money to buy Wave as a separate company or something like that?

Google products are generally dependent on a whole lot of services which only exist within Google, so it'd probably have to be rebuilt after a sale.

I would guess the monorepo makes this very difficult to do

Not as long as products are built on top of proprietary internal SDKs such as google3, borg etc. Google started to open source some of the internal projects (e.g. bazel), which, among other things, would make it easier to just donate / spin off a project they are no longer interested supporting.

I worked at a Google spinoff a few years ago. It took a lot of work to move everything from internal Google infrastructure to external (Google Cloud) and it probably took a full year after the official date of us leaving Google to have everything fully migrated - there were lots of small things like seldom used config files or occasional scripts that still relied on Google’s internal stuff.

Also a failed product from Google will be worth no more than $1 billion which is hard to get the Google C-suite excited about.

One easy way to make a successful startup is to copy something Google is doing completely, and then wait for them to kill it off because it doesn't make enough profit for them to be worthwhile.

Then you soak up all the customers who still wanted it.

Works damn near every time.

How many successful startups have you made from this plan?

Do you have a handful of examples?

Maybe RSS readers?

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