That said, I think Cloud has matured enough that it would now be a good time to consider spinning it off, especially as the regulatory environment around Search & Ads is heating up again in multiple countries. As a third place laggard until TK was hired, Google Cloud didn't really have much of interest to offer beyond the legacy internal data products (BigTable, BQ, Spanner) and GKE/Anthos, so having things like Google Maps, several Verily products, a few things that emerged from Brain/RMI, Google Health, etc made a real difference. There were quite a few "shiny object" solutions Cloud commercialized from other parts of Google/Alphabet over the years, and regardless of all the organizational duplication, fiefdoms and chaos that accompanied having three Cloud CEOs in six years, I think the commercial interest via Google's "innovation story" and One Google pitches created a lot of value. I'm a Cloud xoogler (2015-2023), too, and I'm not sure whether that would have made things easier or harder. Lots of times, the people who would have to fight for them don't have the political will (or maybe even complete history of the product) to commit to staff allocation to keep them alive in the face of the alternative: chasing the next 10x dream. Seeing how those sorts of things play out in actuality, it doesn't surprise me that unpopular or unprofitable products are killed rather than kept on life support. For a while, even somewhat important things like Dory were un-maintained (after Moh Musa left Google), and lots of times it's happened that reorgs caused deprecations. I can't tell you how many times I've read TotT issues or seen threads on eng-misc or elsewhere that would either talking about some new test system and how it handles crufty codebases, or how one should check for dependencies, or what might happen with some internal app that lost its sponsor/maintainer because they either transferred teams or left the company. My impression is that the hassle and pain of doing this is often why languishing projects are deprecated.
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