Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
I don't think it's random, if you look at that which is getting cancelled (and those that seem in some sort of decline, like Picasa) all of them are those that lie outside the business model Google is pursuing.
Regardless of their popularity, all of them are discrete projects that receive no benefit from the common code and infrastructure Google is building. All take a separate effort to maintain.
My years in IT tells me that ongoing maintenance is THE major expense in a software product that can prevent it from ever being profitable. You have to keep people on who understand the code, the reason's why this 'thing' was done 'this' way and not some 'other' way. And no one is ever good enough to get all that stuff down in documentation, and few are good enough to completely absorb the documentation provided.
When you have a coherent and cohesive planned set of software sharing a common core of code, ongoing maintenance is much less costly and more effective since maintenance on one software title automatically provides that maintenance to all SW titles. And you avoid those numerous little pockets of highly paid technical expertise that are never fully utilized.
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Oh, they have reasons, I am not contesting that. The point is - they have a history of starting and stopping projects at unpredictable intervals. So any Google service dependency should be made with caution.