Google's Graveyard of Killed Products That Could Have Been Great

Google Reader died in 2013. RSS fans cried. Google Plus died in 2019. Nobody cried. Google Hangouts died in 2022. People moved to Zoom anyway. Google Stadia died in 2023. Gamers shrugged.

There is a website called Killed by Google. It lists nearly 300 products Google abandoned. Some were good. Inbox by Gmail was better than Gmail. Google Wave was ahead of its time. But Google has attention deficit disorder. They launch products. They get bored. They kill them.

Why? Because Google rewards creating new things. Not maintaining old things. Engineers get promoted for launching. Not for fixing. So they launch and run. Users get tired of this. They stop trusting Google with their digital lives.

For beginners, this is a cautionary tale. Build products you will support for decades. Not for a quarter. Google is brilliant at search and ads. Everything else is temporary. That is a strategy. But it is not a friendly one.