Android

I've always suspected that the reason Google keeps abandoning products is because they're actually in it for the data. They're not out to make a good RSS feed reader or a good music service, they're interested in how people use feed readers or how people use music. Once they sucked all the data they wanted out of it they trash it.

There's also data sources which they've never abandoned, like watching people's location (baked into Android and Maps), or email, or photos, or files (Drive), and of course web search. Probably because the nature of this kind of data remains always relevant.

This is all very interesting for chat because they've been revisiting this product category so many times, trashing and re-doing chat clients in endless variations, as opposed to sticking to one or two (one for enterprise and one for regular people, for example). Not sure what that says about chat as a data source. Either it's a particularly challenging category, or it keeps evolving so Google keep discovering new angles that are worth mining.

There never was before. Alphabet's internal HR metrics heavily weigh creating new products to maintaining new ones. There are a lot of times where the engineers that developed products are no longer on the dev team during launch.

Supposedly the Android team is pretty fiercely firewalled from the rest of Google which is why it's the only time with products that have any kind of longevity.

I'm pretty much all in on Google's ecosystem as it stands, but I'm increasingly wary about using any of their new services as and when they show up—for example, I liked the idea of Stadia and was impressed with its performance, but the fact the games you bought could disappear with the service gave me enough pause to not go all in on it.

Lo and behold, that failed within a couple of years. Though slightly to their credit, they did refund everyone that bought games on the service.