The Ars article misses the point that google is an ad company that uses it's dominance in search to keep the ad money machine going. Everything else is just pl

The Ars article misses the point that google is an ad company that uses it's dominance in search to keep the ad money machine going. Everything else is just playtime to google. So they have no interest in doing the hard work to support any play time projects at all. They are so horrific to deal with at an enterprise level. All this stuff that google shovels out, makes a splash with, and then cancels is just stuff that doesn't further the ad hegemony. You can take or leave the free stuff, if it works for you that's great, but don't expect it to hang around any longer than it serves it's purpose. They don't charge money for this stuff and keep it around once it stops being relevant for ads because the price tag to make a difference to them would be way too high for anyone to pay for it, especially at the consumer level. My exposure at this point is basically just Gmail & Calendar. I'd be pretty bummed if Youtube got the axe though.