Projects getting canceled is the flip side of being able to try new and risky things in a small team without a heavyweight approval process. There's no way that Google would be able to bring to market every single idea that comes out of engineers heads. So they let them experiment a bit in the early stages and then pick the winners once the teams have had a chance to survey the territory.
It's probably my biggest annoyance with working at Google, but I accept it because I know the alternative is worse. If you never canceled projects, then the only things you'd be allowed to work on are Big Important Things blessed by some VP high up, things that are too big to fail. That's how many other big companies work, and they usually end up with idiotic projects where it becomes apparent to everybody (except the VP) that the project is a waste of time, and yet they keep going because some executive staked his career on it.
BTW, startups face this problem too. The equivalent to a canceled project is a failed startup - there're only so many new products that the market can bear, so consumers choose to put their dollars into the products that are most useful and let the others die. The difference between this and the Google model is:
1.) You get to decide when to quit (or the market decides for you, if you run out of money).
2.) You don't get paid for the time you spend deciding.
For many people, this is a bargain worth making, but you should know that's the bargain when you take it. I've been on both sides - I took a pretty nice job in a financial software startup for a couple years out of college, then founded my own company, then folded it up and went to Google, and won't rule out eventually founding another company. The advantage of letting someone else make the decision of when to quit is that these people have had lots of experience picking winners, so once my head was primed with a few failures, I figured it might be a good idea to watch some folks who've actually had some successes and see what they do differently.
If the project was for instance 'wave' then I can easily understand how having it terminated is a pretty gruesome experience. If you have been given the impression that a project has staying power and the carpet gets yanked out from under it before it gets under way I'm not quite sure how I would respond to that but it certainly would not make me happy. (and if the project wasn't wave then I'm really curious what it was).
I have no idea, and if I looked it up, I wouldn't be at liberty to say.
Most project cancellations are things that haven't launched, or if they have launched they might get a TechCrunch article and then are forgotten. There's a lot that goes on in just general infrastructure or search quality that has no UI at all, it just feeds into better ranking algorithms or higher capacity. A lot of this work is experimental, done under the charter of "Let's see if this makes things better, and if it doesn't, we'll have you work on other things."
It's probably my biggest annoyance with working at Google, but I accept it because I know the alternative is worse. If you never canceled projects, then the only things you'd be allowed to work on are Big Important Things blessed by some VP high up, things that are too big to fail. That's how many other big companies work, and they usually end up with idiotic projects where it becomes apparent to everybody (except the VP) that the project is a waste of time, and yet they keep going because some executive staked his career on it.
BTW, startups face this problem too. The equivalent to a canceled project is a failed startup - there're only so many new products that the market can bear, so consumers choose to put their dollars into the products that are most useful and let the others die. The difference between this and the Google model is:
1.) You get to decide when to quit (or the market decides for you, if you run out of money).
2.) You don't get paid for the time you spend deciding.
For many people, this is a bargain worth making, but you should know that's the bargain when you take it. I've been on both sides - I took a pretty nice job in a financial software startup for a couple years out of college, then founded my own company, then folded it up and went to Google, and won't rule out eventually founding another company. The advantage of letting someone else make the decision of when to quit is that these people have had lots of experience picking winners, so once my head was primed with a few failures, I figured it might be a good idea to watch some folks who've actually had some successes and see what they do differently.