> leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying that we must be willi

> leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying that we must be willing to try and see if things stick. This makes sense, but why are people particularly mad at Google for doing this? It must be for a good reason, not merely a meme. Because it doesn't actually make sense. * Google has an audience. I suspect everything Google does is a good enough idea for a small subset of people -- or solves a problem for a lot of people but isn't profitable, like Google Reader -- and because it's Google doing it, a lot of people hear about it and use it. So the shutdown of Google's random ideas affects more people than the shutdown of some random startup. * Google just kills the products completely instead of spinning them off or selling them to interested parties as earlier incarnations of Silicon Valley tech companies would have done. A company not bloated from search advertising revenue would have happily sold something like Google Reader for some money instead of just killing it.