Additional reason: all the infrastructure is changing underneath these projects. Let’s say you have a Google product for feeding people, let’s call it “Google

Additional reason: all the infrastructure is changing underneath these projects. Let’s say you have a Google product for feeding people, let’s call it “Google Feeder”. Now, you need big piles of food to feed people, so you build it on top of “Google Pile System” to manage all of those piles. People like Google Feeder, but it’s not successful enough to fund an engineering team. At some point, Google Pile System gets replaced by a new system for managing piles, called Humongous. Now, what happens to Google Feeder? You’ve decide that it’s too expensive to migrate it from Google Pile System to Humongous, but the problem is, if you want to spin it off into a separate company, you’d need to migrate it off Google Pile System anyway.