This is the natural progression of a culture that values the new toy over maintenance. It shows in the lack of support and inability to find any human support at all. If your entire success is the next thing or the big swing, there is really no incentive to maintain anything unless its absolutely necessary.<p>I love the fact that its so easy in computer work, compared to other professions that have to deal with actual physical things, to build whole new things. On the other hand, I hate the attitude it brings to maintenance and customer service. We are the profession of throw-away cities.
I think many people overestimate how large the teams who are behind most of Google's products. You have a few large ones like search, ads or cloud, but many of the smaller ones are just a few dozens who over the years dwindle down to just a handful as people realize it is a dead end project. At some point the team is not longer big enough to maintain the project and it gets shut down.
This is sort of misleading since it's really just them deprecating things to organize and keep things tidy. You still have access to everything through Google Translate.
This horse has been beaten to death, repeatedly now.<p>Trust that Google's "don't be evil" was earnest has evaporated. *<p>Belief that product/services from Google are anything more then ephemeral has gone up in smoke.<p>Promises that hardware would be supported and provide a baseline for the future are nothing more then delusional and wispy.<p>This is what we get when we have faith in a cloud.<p><i></i>edited and updated. Thanks for the correction.