And Waze too. I love that app's singular focus in improving the driving experience and nothing else as a Maps product.

> singular focus in improving the driving experience

Except for the super distracting Ads that cover half the screen while you're using it every time your car comes to a stop, the sponsored landmark-Ads that put a huge marker over every Dunkin Donuts location while driving, etc.

If you're not in your car to drive to the next Dunkin Donuts, what are you even doing?

I’m surprised (and glad) they didn’t integrate it into Google Maps and shut down Waze.

Lots of it is integrated into Maps: a good portion of the traffic/accident alerts have a "reported by Waze" line at the bottom. I wouldn't be surprised if they start sunsetting Waze once they're fully integrated and finished experimenting on it.

ding ding ding. this guy gets it

I'm pretty sure its because it allows them to experiment with delivering advertisements that they wouldn't be able to shove into GMaps without protest (Waze has ads that cover half the screen with a banner ad every time your car slows down/stops for example).

almost no-one i know that uses waze knows that it's a google product. some even say "i don't even know why google doesn't buy waze!".

(in my country, waze is the go to app for navigation for everyone)

Even I am surprised too but I guess since Google started working on self-driving cars and then after seeing the advent of ride-hailing apps, they may have thought to keep Waze so one day Google can convert it into a ride-hailing + navigation app. Maybe that's the plan who knows!

i still don't get that argument. target audience of Waze is people who have cars and drive it around. people don't open up waze to get a taxi, they open it up to start driving.

Yes mostly related to advertising in some way which is their core business (besides 510). I think OP wasn't remarking about the financial success of the company as a part of Google, but the absorbing by Google of former SAAS companies and finally dropping their original paying customers.

We are a Looker customer and are concerned. It seems Google is one of the only companies that can buy a SAAS enterprise product that people are paying a lot of money for, and eventually drop enterprise customers for the free* model. Hundreds of millions or even low billions of revenue isn't interesting to them it seems.

> Dropping their original paying customers

When a Cloud company acquired a product/service for integration into their platform, I would hope that that includes transitioning to a Cloud friendly consumption based model. If that means including a free tier, or paying peanuts for low usage, that’s a good thing!

Finally, Google’s (GCP’s really) enterprise SaaS (mostly) acquisitions that I can think of are - StackDriver, Firebase, Apigee, Velostrata, Alooma and Cask. The venerable ones like StackDriver and Firebase are IMHO well integrated into the platform. The others are too relatively new? Curious which ones you had in mind that dropped enterprise customers?

look at Nest and how hard people that invested in the ecosystem were hit.

It’s interesting that Thomas Kurian (who heads GCP) announced the purchase. He’s ex-Oracle and really understands the enterprise and enterprise software.

And despite Google’s other product demises in the consumer space, GCP has had a decent track record thus far.

you need to put things in perspective. I could argue that the above are not successful and I would also like to see how many acquisitions total were made and what percentage actually end up not straight-up dying.