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Comment by asim | Hacker News Reader

They are ruthless and actually that's probably a good thing. At the scale they operate it's more obvious and affects many more users but if a product is not working e.g not reaching Google scale, then you gotta kill it. Maintaining it just to save face isn't the answer. Doesn't stop it being really annoying when largely everything is deprecated on Google Cloud or they kill your favourite niche product but I'm still a big google search and gmail user.

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If they want to be ruthless, they should also highlight this bold and center at product launch in any Terms & Conditions.

    This product will be deprecated and shutdown in the future if it doesn't consistently bring in $X billion within $Y quarters and within $Z operating cost. Kindly use at your own risk.

Which is why I just don’t bother integrating any Google products in to my life. They throw random shit at the wall and most of it won’t last a year.

In what way is it good?

Avoiding sunk cost fallacy? I.e. if their metrics show that a certain service is a net loss for them, they kill it? At least I hope that's their reasoning and data.

Yeah, very good. They created a situation when you simply cannot trust them on any product they have. A calendar, do you use it today? What if they’ll kill it tomorrow?

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