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.
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?
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.
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.