Has Waymo become successful reaching a critical mass of users yet? If so, they would most likely shut it down based on historical examples. Imagine if they had sold those deprecated products instead. Maybe not a financial significance, but there'd be some interesting products still kicking
Considering Boston Dynamics sat around for like 15 years being a research lab and only started commercializing when they were sold... I'd agree.
Argue with that as you like but Google _loves_ to sit around on good ideas and, in my opinion, hamstring them away from pushing their products to commercialization.
What's the highest revenue product that Google shut down? Maybe Google+? But I wouldn't be surprised if Waymo is already making way more revenue than Google+ ever did, while barely scratching the surface of immediate demand.
was G+ around long enough to generate revenue at all? there was no activity on it that would have been worthy to buy ad space within it. obviously, theGoog had the advantage of owning the ad space just like they had an advantage of converting all G users to G+ users without consent from those users. Even with that, they still had no users
Yeah, I don't blame anyone for thinking Google shuts down products constantly, but to be fair, they're making hundreds of billions per year and the stuff they shut down are almost all little hobby projects that people love, but are a terrible business for them. That's pretty different from shutting down Waymo.
