I don't think it is necessarily a "problem" that it can't be perf-farmed anymore though. Google groups isn't perfect but it does a lot of things well (the bugs

I don't think it is necessarily a "problem" that it can't be perf-farmed anymore though. Google groups isn't perfect but it does a lot of things well (the bugs mentioned in TFA not withstanding), is used extensively internally at Google, and doesn't necessarily need a lot of new features. There are a ton of internal products at Google that are also staffed by one or two people in maintenance mode and it's not a problem. As an example, I recently checked the internal symbolization service at Google (that handles symbolization for C++ executables, which is in turn used for generating performance profiles and symbolizing things like stack traces generated by core dumps) and the team maintaining it was two people. And those people aren't solely maintaining the symbolization service, they're compiler engineers who spend most of their time working on other projects and spend a small amount of their time maintaining the symbolization service as issues come up or bugs are reported. But this isn't a problem. The symbolization service works and is basically feature complete. There's no reason to have a team of ten people actively working on it.