My understanding is that Google tends to have internal metrics around all of this stuff, if the data is coming back that usage is declining enough - they usually re-prioritize their efforts. Not necessarily saying I would do the same, but I believe that's how it's supposed to work
The biggest cultural weakness at Google seems to be the No Human support policy and outsourced regional distribution which fuels a growing divide between engineers and customers.
The myopic salarymen who shut down entire product lines based on usage metrics that seem to pale in comparison to Google Search metrics do not understand complex systems, do not understand startups (and the fragility of growth) and certainly don't understand branding or hiring. If these nerds had ever run a business themselves and spent time talking to the customers who pay their salaries, they would spin out these companies instead of sunsetting them.
A large part of leadership/strategy in tech companies is ex-consultants and MBAs.
Engineers don't call all the shots with sunsetting projects.
If anything, we have a healthy (?) skepticism of product managers too but they definitely do talk to customers, look deeply into metrics and think about branding.
This is the single reason why Google Cloud will never be successful, at least in the next decade. A huge number of software engineers have been burned by being treated as Google statistics. That works great for ads or search, but Google has a reputation as someone you would never, ever, ever, ever build a sustainable business around.
There is a critical mass of people who simply won't use Google in a business-critical setting, and it's growing quickly. Now, that adds any GSuite office which relied on Google for working printers. Is that a lot? Probably not. Multiply that times each time this has happened before, and times the never of businesses wacked out-of-business by Google's automated algorithms, and at this point, I think it's quickly reaching the point where most teams have a Google horror story or two.
It's fine for purely transactional businesses (ones with zero startup/shutdown costs -- for example, one can arbitrage adwords and referral fees).
My guess is that at some point, Google will realize this, either from data or otherwise, and sunset GCE and related services, probably with very short notice, leaving many businesses hanging.
Short of giving a 10-year guarantee of keeping services running at specific cost and service levels, with real liability (not externalizing costs to customers again), I don't see how Google could address this.
