Other companies kill projects when they’ve clearly failed and basically nobody is using. Google will kill things that are moderately successful and people are dependent on, but they aren’t a blockbuster success that makes a difference compared to their ad revenue.
But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
I have the same suspicion regarding Google Podcasts. The UI is stable and it doesn't seem to try very hard to promote ads or podcasts I'm not already subscribed to. I do worry that someone in Google management will realize that this product exists and decide that it's in their personal interest to either "improve" it by rearranging the entire UI until it's unusable, or just shut it down entirely.
I don't know how successful, but I loved Inbox. The current GMail is still not close, so I'm phasing out my Google mail account.
I also enjoyed Google+ despite Google's attempts to make it worse at the end. Still miss the discussions there. A few of the communities and people moved to forums or similar, but several I've lost contact with.
A good friend of mine had built his business around the Google Earth API. He made simulators for employee training as well as games.
Another good friend still relies on Picasa, as we haven't found anything that fits his image managing needs in an equally easy way. Sure it still works, but for how long who knows.
I've seen multiple things be deprecated while at Google and I can say that the things I saw killed from the inside (because it was a product I worked on) in the past 5 years were either not being used by many users anymore or had an alternative that had similar features instead.
So if you depended on it, you could depend on something else. And if it was successful, it wasn't canceled.
I didn't work on Stadia but I imagine that it was a huge waste of money for the company for the relatively few users it had. If they could have offered a good subscription based service like Xbox Game Pass or Apple Arcade I'm sure it would have more users. But getting access to content would be very expensive. At least they refunded consumers' money for the games they purchased.
Stadia. Many game developers had spent months or even years of their life developing Stadia ports or exclusives and then it was cancelled without any warning.
As to whether it was successful - I mean, it didn't exist long enough to answer that question.
Other things that come to mind are Chromecast Audio and OnHub.
It's not about this particular list. People have been burned multiple times in the past by Google so they're going to be bitter and jump all over them whenever they cancel anything.
Maybe not "moderately successful", but if I bought a router from Google and it was no longer supported / discontinued, I would probably avoid buying a Google product again.
I think that general routers, such as TP-LINK products, become obsolete faster than Google routers because they only receive one or two firmware updates with no significant feature additions during their product cycle.
Not really, because other than things like newer standards (that'd necessitate new hardware anyway) there isn't really any changes that need to made once it works.
But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.