Just responding to the OP "Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever?"

Which to be clear they are not responsible for running all their services forever, but it puts a lie to the idea that google is fine with stability in a service, they'll take something commercially successful enough and sacrifice it for something else in hope it attains "hypergrowth".

At the end of the day google doesnt give a flip about its customers, the structure of google will always incentive new services over fixing/maintaining existing stuff and anyone who has a pollyannish view of this needs to wake up.