I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap.
Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services.
I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.
Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services.
I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.