Google has been a complete imbecile when it comes to these things.<p>It&#x27;s simple game theory, If i&#x27;ve been burnt by google shutting down something i&#x27;ve made part of my workflow or rely on (I&#x27;m sure most people at hacker news have been in this situation) I&#x27;m far less likely to adopt their next big idea.<p>They could have a division which puts these projects on life support or hell sells them to another company or even open source some of their products and let the community support them!<p>I&#x27;m still salty about google reader and their original podcast app on android among other things it would have been so easy to do right by their users.