Orkut was great ... but not exploitable in terms of commerce. It lost almost all its market share in the industrially developed West, but was huge in BRIC coun

Orkut was great ... but not exploitable in terms of commerce. It lost almost all its market share in the industrially developed West, but was huge in BRIC countries. Not the target demographic Google was looking to exploit at the time. And thus it got killed. Google is primarily a marketing company. They need to make money off of their products. In that context, all the products you reference, which I agree were pretty great, were not useful to Google. So they got killed, or allowed to languish, in the hope that they would at least drive new users into the Google ecosystem. I do have to disagree with part of your assessment of Google Photos. You are 100% accurate ... it's a file dumpster with a UI that I routinely forget about. And that's perfect. I do not need to have a relationship with my software. But it quietly functions in the background, and periodically rewards me with an animation or AI-generated image? Hey, that's pretty cool. I'll share that with my family and friends. And that's what Google wants to see.