Lockdown
Entitlement. I has it.<p>Why does HN continue to think that companies on the web who give their services to millions of users away <i>for free</i> (please don't repeat the you are the product being sold meme),  are <i>entitled</i> to direct said companies to keep any project you deem useful around for as long as you deem it important (to said $RANDOM_MILLION_USER)?<p>With a userbase the size of Google there will be millions of people complaining about removing every single product they've ever released. Google isn't the Oracle of the world where Oracle releases a product, charges you out the wazoo, gives you 24/7 support and only enter the market of said product after researching if it is a good business investment or not. Google is the one who experiments, tests, lets you use for free, and either retires or promotes projects which turn out to be good for the company (either tech wise, or to the dismay of HN money wise). That's their MO.<p>Google and Facebook allow you to export your data for most of their services, and I think we can all agree that Google at least are good at giving users a fair amount of heads up before they sunset a product (or should we call it an experiment?).<p>It seems the prevailing notion on HN anymore is once you are a big company (bad), any service you offer the internet no matter how long ago, should be kept around indefinitely, because you are a big company (bad) and you now make a lot of money (bad). Therefore you should let everyone free ride on your platform so that fellow (broke) startups can bootstrap themselves off your prior work (good). But once said (good, broke) startups start making lots of cash, they will then become (bad) and fall into the same category of other (bad) internet giants.