Google Code Shutting Down

Google just recently announced that they are going to begin the process of shutting down their Google Code project hosting service. In the blog post announcing that they were shuttering the service, they let it slip that even Google had quit using Google Code for their project hosting, instead transitioning thousands of their projects to GitHub. Google seemingly blames the fact that GitHub and BitBucket handle project hosting better than Google does as the main reason that they are discontinuing the service.

However, what is really going on here is that Google is ending another one of its services that it has yet to find a way to monetize. With GitHub being so ubiquitous in the open source and enterprise markets, Google failed to make enough inroads into the enterprise markets to generate enough revenue to continue the service. Google’s other profitable product lines all rely upon harvesting the data you store in their services and to generate relevant advertising based on that data. This advertising model gets quite a bit murkier when the data is source code, something that, unless Stack Exchange is looking to advertise, has quite the narrow applicability to advertising revenue.

It seems again to tell us one very important thing about Google. If you choose to use one of their products, don’t be surprised when they shut that nifty product without much advertising down. The product that you know will keep going are those that are conducive to advertising, such as GMail, Drive, and Search, anything else may be fair game for a shutdown at any point in time.

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