Because they don’t just kill the services. In some cases, they cannibalize apps/services and add features to other comparable projects. Inbox’s labels and snooze made their way into Gmail. A handful of Allo features are now in Meets and Messages. So on and so forth.
Gmail had labels well before Inbox. They threw away the useful part of Inbox, which was the automagical organization.
I think I meant categories/groups/bundles and not labels. The “Primary” “Promotion” “Updates” tabs.
And those pale in comparison to the Inbox categories. They actually make it harder to organize my email now.
Sometimes they do; e.g. Google Domains was recently sold to Squarespace.
Iirc this was prompted by regulation, not an actual desire to sell.
And that was the catalyst for me to move to a different registrar.
Because Dennis is a bastard man !
Because the revenue they expect to get from the product will likely not cover the cost of the operations.
TL;DR money.
Google wave was sold off too, they absolutely do sell some things, just they prefer to take features and ideas to use in other products.
Who bought it?
A big part of it is corporations simply eliminating competition. Why improve yourself when you can buy them out, scrape them for parts and then dissolve.
We must not forget another factor though: A lot of these apps, companies and studios are built on a startup model. They were never designed to be profitable or even economically sustainable. Their entire goal was to create a flashy product with positive user experience and then to get bought by a bigger company. That’s the cash-out time, and most of startups don’t really plan for anything afterwards.
You get bought, you do your time (1-2 years of continued service for the new owners) and then cash out, break loose and either retire or go fund another startup.
There are some cases, like game studio Bungie, where the company itself had vision beyond selling out and after being bought by Microsoft and not loving it - bought itself OUT and then continued its existence (until being bought by Sony). Most of startups don’t think that far, and the product they truly build is not an app or a service but simply stockholder value. They make the buyer’s stock go up when they get acquired and get paid for that.
It’s kinda sad to see for someone like me who was brought up with the ideals of building things that last and creating your own legacy, but that’s today’s startup-driven innovation economy.
- Because their products are made to work with their infrastructure, their frameworks, their internal systems. Just making the software for Google Wave run on some independent server would be a big job.
- Selling the software without the team that maintains it is a bad deal. It’s really hard to just read a huge pile of code and figure out how to work with it. When Google acquires a product, they usually acquire the team also.
- Who would buy a product that Google has decided isn’t worth it? New Google products launch with lots of free promotion from Google, including integration into their other products. If Google can’t make it work even with all that, how can someone smaller hope to make it work independently?
