You can't fire and forget a service at Google, promo-driven churn in the tech stack will break it sooner or later. So you have to staff every service for indefinite maintenance, or kill it in an orderly way. This is also what happened to Reader.
So now our key internet services last about as long as the average team tenure. We really need open standards so we can rely on the internet as the infrastructure, not some cloud provider. Google will die one day like other services. One has to wonder about the fate of all the artifacts people entrust to it: they will be erased just like every time before.
