A "product" is something people pay for. Nobody pays directly for Gmail or Youtube, or most of Google's well known "products".
That fundamentally distorts their incentive to develop and release improvements according to what the customer wants, because customer satisfaction or loyalty isn't the KPI, it's the growth rate of new customers.
Get them through the door by any means necessary and suck up all their data. If a customer leaves the service, who cares? Their data has already been profiled for better ad targeting.
They might have left Stadia, but they're still very much in the Google-verse of search, Youtube or Android.
Google Apps for Business will stick around, I have little doubt about that. Not because it's a paid product line, but because the underlying free product is used by hundreds of millions of people for mission-critical tasks (email, schoolwork, office work etc).
Same goes for Google Analytics and Tag Manager, which offers an incredible set of features for free, even though their is a paid Analytics 360 tier.
How many users would it take for Stadia to achieve that kind of critical mass? Gaming is not as sticky as email or collaborative document editing. So if the critical mass is not reached, I'd expect them to discontinue it.
That fundamentally distorts their incentive to develop and release improvements according to what the customer wants, because customer satisfaction or loyalty isn't the KPI, it's the growth rate of new customers.
Get them through the door by any means necessary and suck up all their data. If a customer leaves the service, who cares? Their data has already been profiled for better ad targeting.
They might have left Stadia, but they're still very much in the Google-verse of search, Youtube or Android.