Google Graveyard

Stadia, the revolutionary online gaming system launched by Google in 2019 is the last victim of the product axing policy. It joins the Google Graveyard, the resting place for wonderful applications like Google Reader, Google Inbox, Google Travel, Google Music and many more. What is even worse, when Stadia hits the graveyard next year, it will create an environmental problem by bricking thousands of game controllers people bought to use with the service.

Some time ago I was nagged by a Google representative to switch our cloud operations from AWS to Google. My answer was simple - "never". No matter how good the offer was, there was always the risk they would kill the product forcing us to invest in porting it to another cloud platform. I simply do not trust Google when it comes to their product strategy. One day a product exists and the next day it may be axed, like it happened with many.

This is why we use the Atlassian suite for tracking software issues and documentation development and Slack for communications. That also is why privately I like Feedly, Medium, Gaia, Spotify. Yes I still use Blogger, but my blogs have such a simple structure that in case they kill Blogger, it will be straightforward to migrate. Yes I still use Photos, Here - I hope - the likelihood they will axe it is low. But just in case all my photos are in Adobe Cloud as the primary backup and source catalog.

But overall I'm very cautious not to invest too much in any of Google's product. It is counterintuitive, as one would think chances of any of the small(er) cloud product provides have higher chances of going out of business or pivoting. But actually this is not the case.