From Thurrott:

“Google is retiring Android Auto for Phone Screens for good. Google had already made the app incompatible on Android 12 handsets last year…”

Laurent Giret

The headline of course grabbed me, saying Google was sunsetting something. It gave me a new thought.

Since Google is somewhat infamous for frequently killing off products and services, I often wonder why or how Blogger is still alive.

My new realization is that maybe Google only retires current or ongoing initiatives. Products or services that Google has launched with a purpose and a vision may get sunsetted when either the entire initiative is deemed unprofitable or the effort to seize a market opportunity undergoes a big pivot.

So Blogger doesn’t get retired because it’s not an ongoing Google initiative. Google isn’t pushing Blogger forward with progress; there exists no discernible efforts or resources behind Blogger that need to be reallocated. It’s simply a relic of the past that has somehow survived, and it’s been pushed aside into a quiet corner of a dusty basement underneath a Google datacenter in a nondescript location.

It is quite curious how Blogger, around 2012, was being integrated with Google+, which was once a new Google social initiative, but was then decoupled from the social network. And while Google+ was retired, Blogger somehow was left to live or maybe left to die yet it persists.

For the record, I’m glad Blogger still exists today and hope it remains for nostalgia if nothing else.

Products and services (tools) are usually means to an end (results), to an initiative with a purpose. When an initiative ends or changes, the associated product or service, no longer needed, typically follows suit. But in the case of Blogger, it somehow lives beyond whatever initiative Google had for it when purchased in 2003, as far as I can tell.

Any Blogger initiative seems long dead, though Blogger itself lives on for now.