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0 pointsxkcd-sucks5y ago0 comments

Is it even remotely possible that Google would sell discontinued products to other entities, e.g. raise money to buy Wave as a separate company or something like that?

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5 comments · 3 top-level

ithkuil5y ago· 2 in thread

Not as long as products are built on top of proprietary internal SDKs such as google3, borg etc. Google started to open source some of the internal projects (e.g. bazel), which, among other things, would make it easier to just donate / spin off a project they are no longer interested supporting.

alasdair_5y ago

I worked at a Google spinoff a few years ago. It took a lot of work to move everything from internal Google infrastructure to external (Google Cloud) and it probably took a full year after the official date of us leaving Google to have everything fully migrated - there were lots of small things like seldom used config files or occasional scripts that still relied on Google’s internal stuff.

ponker5y ago

Also a failed product from Google will be worth no more than $1 billion which is hard to get the Google C-suite excited about.

jordanthoms5y ago

Google products are generally dependent on a whole lot of services which only exist within Google, so it'd probably have to be rebuilt after a sale.

dmoy5y ago

I would guess the monorepo makes this very difficult to do

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