I believe this highlights the difference between products and services...two words we tend to use interchangeably.<p>Services benefit from turning things off, because operating them costs time and money. It doesn't matter if you lose a subset of users who cared, because your operational metrics are what you optimize for. I used to manage a team of three engineers that couldn't do anything new because we owned 10 legacy backend services that were relatively unused. We followed a rubric similar to this.<p>Products, however, never benefit from turning things off, because it lowers value. For example, imagine the trivial case where a desktop product with no backend removes a feature because it's deemed niche. This would make no sense except in cases that are, themselves, niche.<p>Everything is a service now, so I understand how these words can get conflated. Services have subscription fees, which are better for the business to plan YoY. However, let's not forget that services and products are different things, and if you're using something that will inevitably turn things off the longer you use it, then you're using a service. Consider this the next time you're in a thread complaining about the planned obsolescence of iPhones or that Google shut down Google Reader.