In all likelihood the “transfer” is just a way for Google to save face and avoid yet another “Google kills project” news cycle. Good on the editors for not falling for it.

Another possibility is that the legal landscape was more hostile than Google anticipated and they essentially got squeezed out.

Isn't "this didn't go the way we thought it would and we're not willing to fight for it" the reason why all their products die?

No, it seems their products die because there's more prestige in launching a product than maintaining one.

"This went poorly because we care far more about launch than execution" is really the same spirit as the gp's paraphrase.

Many products from Google die because is a bottom up company: many ideas that make it into products come from Engineering directly, (guys who wants o solve challenging problems), to later find out that the business analysis was poor...and an internal performance system that advocates for launches

So, extremely poor governance?

Definitely, specially in Cloud where Enterprise don't like cool projects or experiments, they need solid roadmap and commitment from product companies

silicon valley: “fail fast”

also silicon valley: “google shuts down too many things”

public: not interested in adopting a product that likely will disappear when I start to depend on it

public: This would have been such a lovely product, now it will never happen :(

same public: not paying for wifi in some area for a year, on somebody else's dime, but still getting upset at whoever provided it when the glory days are over.

Even if you pay for it, it’s highly likely to disappear when it comes to Google.

If I hand my child over to someone else to raise forever, I'm ditching them. :p

bad analogy. There's no parent/child relationship between this service and google. As long as the service is continued, there's no issue as to who is owning and operating it.

Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

Products often die when transferred to another organisation. They never say that they will die in the announcement.

See https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

It's entirely reasonable for people to assume this is basically Google shutting down the free WiFi service but with extra steps.

> Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.

In the same way that when a child is adopted, it instantly dies?

Nah, my analogy between a kid or a car is that if you get thing that is meant to be decently long term, car at least a year or a kid at least 18 years, you wouldn't give up in 3 months. There's not many things a person would own or have that giving up in 3 months wouldn't see like ditching it. Even giving up a cell phone in 3 months is pretty daft

When you are Google, you have millions in funding, almost unlimited engineering ressources, political connections and many good reasons why a project would be successful (journalists, audience, users, accounts, etc)

Once you transfer the responsibilities; all of the support that kept the project stay afloat disappears. It's not sustainable anymore, there is much limited growth, all the business model for exploiting data for advertising cannot exist anymore, etc.

Well, it's dead you know.

Depends if the project continues to use google branding or has a “built by google” tagged on to it in order to mislead customers that it is still somehow maintained by them.

A 3 month old at that

But if you sell a car to a new owner, you aren't ditching it in the woods.

Notice that you had to add "in the woods" to make it clear that ditching is negative here.

If you owned it for 3 months, I'd think you were nuts.