I would definitely not base any sort of important business function on any free Google beta product without seriously considering the difficulty of migrating up

I would definitely not base any sort of important business function on any free Google beta product without seriously considering the difficulty of migrating upon shutdown of said service. I assume that a major criterion for Google shutting down a service is low usage. For them, that constitutes failure. Very few people were using Notebook, Calendar Search, Wave, or Code Search. I'm sure it's fairly simple to calculate the cost benefit of devoting even minimal resources to a product that 1. doesn't make money; and 2. doesn't substantially make the web better for some minimum threshold of people. Google is one of the richest companies in the world and could afford a lot of things, but that's not justification that it should. You're right that there's an interesting tension between starting/failing fast and getting people to trust that a product will stick around. But I don't actually think that's a big part of the calculation for most people. When Google releases a new product, I usually go either "Ooh, that sounds awesome, I'm signing up for the beta immediately," or "Not interested, moving on." I rarely go "I'm not going to use this because it probably won't get enough users to last." I'm glad to hear that going with startup technologies is going well for you, but the danger seems just as big. Startups fail all the time, and you have no recourse afterward.