> Gmail was a success from the beginning

Interestingly, I don't think that was obvious from inside the company.

Maybe some day this will be declassified by one of the early PMs or engineers, it's a great story.

Interesting. The amount of invite code sharing / trading was huge from the moment I learned about gmail. I'd love to hear the story of the issues!

Some thing driving the invites was the promise of some GB of free storage, which some people abused in creative ways via their APIs (I remember a fuse driver storing files as mail attachments ...)

I remember a lot of buzz around invites for Google+, too.

And early on, despite a lot of anti-marketing that I still suspect was simply bought by FB, it was really great and vibrant. In its most original implementation, even.

Later on, the campaign of "complaints" about how empty it was got them to change bits of it, pushing "follow those people" on you that was filled with brain-numbing celebs and the like, and the magic was gone.

Whoever orchestrated that campaign should get a raise (and shouldn't meet me, as G+ was last web-based social media that I could earnestly use)

I believe it was an internal product before it was ever a publicly available one. IIRC it was successful inside and was public dogfooding at that point. Maybe I am mis-remembering.

I mean if they don't try things - "Google just sits on cash". If they do try things and fail "Google just kills products". HN will never be happy with what Google does. I just wish people here are consistent with these attitudes across companies.

There are other options than not do anything or kill what you don't need. For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold. theoldreader seems to be doing well even though they had to reimplement the whole service.

Wave got partially opensourced, after a while. I'm sure someone would buy Google trips.

Sure, Google itself wouldn't benefit much from those, but if they're killing the service anyway, it would improve the image.

> For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold

For things on the Google stack selling isn't really easy.

Things they acquired , like picassa, could probably be sold again, but there they wanted to migrate to Google Photos.

>> For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold

> For things on the Google stack selling isn't really easy.

If Google would build their new products using only publicly available GCP features, that would be a really smart move.

It would signal that they're confident enough about GCP to build their own products on it, and they can spin off products that are small successes but not large enough to move the needle at Google scale. Or if they're not profitable, open source them and allow people to run their own instance of it on GCP if they want.

Interestingly one of the few things they spun off - Niantic (ingress/Pokemon go) runs on Google app engine (and/or other Google cloud offerings)

Please apply the same standards to other companies. How many big tech sell off killed products. There are numerous IP issues etc.. Not to mention how ingrained these products are to internal infra. Google is pretty good about open sourcing internal libraries as a counter point.