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.
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.
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 the revenue they expect to get from the product will likely not cover the cost of the operations.
TL;DR money.
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.
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.
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.
