Those 3 along with maps, ads, and a handful of others make up the list of "safe" Google products.
I agree with you though, it is the niche products that get shutdown. My point is that being an early adopter of Google products is a very risky move. Until a product is adopted by the masses and profitable, it should not be considered safe.
Back in the day, I used to be all in on the Google bandwagon. I was in on Wave, Buzz, Meebo and bunch of others. After a few years of cycling through the standard phases:
1) Wow this is really cool
2) Wow I'm starting to use this everyday
3) Wow my friends should know about
4) Google is killing this
Once you get over the idea their killing something you started to rely on and then you experience their "customer service" a few times you just wonder if its actually about trying to make the world a better place, or just adding revenue to their bottom line.
My conclusion a long time ago was not to use them for anything personal and FFS nothing I would have my business rely on.
Several years later, Wave was especially disappointing to me: It was Slack, before Slack was a thing. They just didn't know how to market Wave, so no one knew why it was useful.
If Wave was first released a couple years later, with identical functionality, I think it would've done well.
The same problem applies though. It's not just services disappearing, it's the complete lack of support for services.
I'm in the process of moving everything off of my gmail email as I have a friend that recently lost access to their gmail account. There was no way for them to get it back – no human to speak with, no steps that they could follow to recover their account. They were supposed to be able to "sign in with an old device", but that didn't work either. Just gone. And apparently this has happened to a lot of people.
