re: “It's why all their other services, save for gmail and google docs, have come and gone.”
I am still bitter they cancelled Google Wave, and then the cool Apache open source version stopped being supported.
A lot of our digital lives fades away when Google and other companies sunset products. I am mostly OK with that, since new stuff gets developed also. We control our own personal domains and web sites, our own writing, and our code. I can live with enjoying tech Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. produce, hopefully without having strong dependencies on any of it.
I made fun of Google Wave a lot at the time because it wasn't clear what it was for. (Is it chat? Authoring? Google+?)
Eventually one of my friends forced me to try it and ... it was the coolest thing! It worked so well! I used it for note taking and collaboration but not for long because it was cancelled basically immediately.
I am still bitter they cancelled Google Wave, and then the cool Apache open source version stopped being supported.
A lot of our digital lives fades away when Google and other companies sunset products. I am mostly OK with that, since new stuff gets developed also. We control our own personal domains and web sites, our own writing, and our code. I can live with enjoying tech Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. produce, hopefully without having strong dependencies on any of it.