The problem, as I understand it from talking to Google employees, is twofold: 1) Many of these products rely on internal infrastructure and/or hosting that isn

The problem, as I understand it from talking to Google employees, is twofold: 1) Many of these products rely on internal infrastructure and/or hosting that isn't readily available outside of Google. (They're basically built on a sort of internal Google "cloud" that has access to code not available outside Google.) 2) It would cost more money than the product reasonably makes to both move the product off the Google infrastructure/codebase AND find a team willing to continue to develop it. Remember, most of these products didn't really make any money; they were internal projects that released externally and had fan clubs.