Let employees to start new projects and shut it down later if it does not seem to be profitable. This strategy just make sense. But I just want google to make the works open sourced when abandoned. I hope google opensource Duplex for web...
That's not the strategy though.
The strategy is "I'll get promotion for launching, not maintaining" for employees, and "we're still making a shit ton of money, so why bother" from the top brass.
This leads to a lack of trust, so things like GCP suffer. Regardless of the technical merits, or price, I can never use GCP because I don't trust Google. This is largely due to their willingness to kill things, coupled with a lack of phone support.
Incidentally lots of the things shut down were successful, and profitable, by most company standards. Just not by google-scale standards.