Look, most of those decisions are very hard and driven by the ecosystem's momentum.
I'll give you a more recent example: Google is currently working on Timely, the next generation calendar system. We decided to focus on the mobile version and cancel the web interface, which was almost finished and that will never be released.
So we told all those engineers to shift there efforts to the mobile version and we'll have to find someone willing to keep the old messy calendar codebase in shape. All those bug reports from enterprise customers that were closed because those issues were fixed in Timely? Who cares?
Sounds like a terrible decision, right? That's how we do things at Google these days.
I'll give you a more recent example: Google is currently working on Timely, the next generation calendar system. We decided to focus on the mobile version and cancel the web interface, which was almost finished and that will never be released.
So we told all those engineers to shift there efforts to the mobile version and we'll have to find someone willing to keep the old messy calendar codebase in shape. All those bug reports from enterprise customers that were closed because those issues were fixed in Timely? Who cares?
Sounds like a terrible decision, right? That's how we do things at Google these days.