It actually can be considered a success in the style of the original intent of Chrome, Fiber, the Nexus line, and who knows, maybe the upcoming MVNO: to spur innovation and increased investment in a stagnating product area.

When Google Code came out Source Forge was horrible, and Github didn't exist. Google Code helped both open source software and the market for code hosting. Now there's a dominant, but so far so great, offering with Github, and several very good competitors.

Google Code wouldn't have even launched today, it's both necessary to projects and to Google.