There are many ways to be promoted and launching something new is definitely not the easiest way.

I understand that it's common to see people leave a team or product once they shipped a promo project, but products don't just die because one or two senior people leave a team.

From the beginning of the article:

> The Google unit, (...) is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.

I'm sure that there are discussions about the strategy, the expected growth and revenue and what to do if these targets aren't met. It totally makes sense to reduce the rate of investments to mitigate risks if the results aren't what was expected, but this doesn't mean "shutting down" Cloud.

From the article:

> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely,

Seriously, Google could even decide to leave the Cloud business eventually, branching it off the rest of the company. But "shutting it down" wouldn't suddenly happen because a spreadsheet shows that Azure has more market shares than Google.