> It's a bit of a cop out to say "we were never trying to win"

It's literally not? We had a goal from the beginning - create enough competition to either force SF to become better (at that time it was infinite ads and malware), or that someone else wins.

> You should have been trying to win, you should have built a strong competitor to GitHub and you shouldn't have let it rot until it was shut down

That's your goal, not mine (or at the time, Google). Feel free to do it!

You don't like what we had as a goal - that's okay. It doesn't mean we either failed, or had the wrong goal. We just had one you don't happen to like.

> The world would have been a better place if Google code tried to be as good as GitHub

One of the things to ask before you either start something or keep doing something is "who actually wants you to win?" If the answer is "nobody", it might not make any sense to do.

It's not obvious in 2016 anyone would have wanted us to win. By then, Google had lived long enough to see itself become a villain. There was reasonable competition in the space.

I don't believe we would have really served people well to keep going.

It sucks you're getting so much anti-Google sentiment when you're not at all attached to the reasons google sort of sucks.

It was similar with Chrome. Internet Explorer was the monoculture browser and stagnating. Google had things they wanted to do on the web but needed better browsers. The original goal was to introduce competition in the browser space so that all browsers would get better. They may have changed goals along the way, but that was the original stated goal. In the end they killed IE and now they are the monoculture outside of Safari.

When Chrome was released, Internet Explorer was not the monoculture browser, and 1/3 of the users had Firefox installed.

Different groups of people have different goals. Not every group of people has "winning" a market as their primary goal.

> If you were never trying to win, that's a product failure.

what?