[office_drone]

A lot of what you said is accurate, but then the ideal play would not be to shut down non-core projects, but rather to sell them or spin them off into their own companies.

...which partly-happened via licensing in the article, but they didn't realize the full value of the working operation.

[toast0]

Spinning them off has a cost too; at least to Goog, potential sales proceeds don't seem to justify the sales costs, so they shut everything down.

Also, it may be slightly profitable when run under the umbrella, but not once you consider the cost of separate administration. That's especially true for things like Google Reader --- that project benefited enormously from living on Google Infra, behind Google Login, and you'd have to do a lot of refactoring and rebuilding to get it to run elsewhere, and then you'd have to get people to create new accounts, etc. And there wasn't much revenue there, certainly not enough to make it a viable standalone business.