They buy their competition and use the parts they want and discard the rest. Sort of like how EA and Microsoft operate. They kill things even if they are profitable, because to a multi-billion dollar company a little profit is not enough, it needs to be wildly profitable or they move on.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Because continuous growth each quarter is totally sustainable long term!
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.
They introduce competitors to themselves
Do you sell the IP, or do you sell the 'company' including the employees? Problematic when your employees jump from one product to the next.
New products might be thought more of as test beds, R&D, getting patents. So you don't want to sell the IP. Remember the whole patent problem so they had to buy Moto just for the patents - which they then sold the manufacturing line.
They don't really make these sorts of services to be sold off. I imagine that most services are very embedded in Google's servers and systems.
Also, a lot of these services are loss leaders that Google hasn't figured out how to monetize. I can't imagine that another company would want to put together a bid to purchase.
Because the revenue they expect to get from the product will likely not cover the cost of the operations.
TL;DR money.
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.
They're integrated in-house products. To get them into a sellable separated state would require additional effort that's just not worth it to them.
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?
Don't think it got sold off but Apache got it, it's since been discontinued again after not much work.
Because Dennis is a bastard man !
My take/assumption is that Google's projects are "free" so they can mine your metadata and sell advertising.
That's their core business model.
So, once the cost of maintaining a product outweighs the revenue made from mining your data and selling advertising, the product gets shutdown.
- 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?
What
https://killedbygoogle.com/ Why they don't sell some of them?
They do. Google domains got split and sold before being shut.
The reason they dont do it for more is likely they cannot find buyers because the products don't have a path to monetization to justify a purchase from a VC.