Can you show me statistically that Google is any more likely to discontinue something than any other startup? Or than Apple or Amazon?
A few people got upset about Google discontinuing Reader, but that was a looong time ago. And they've certainly discontinued other things to... but just like every other company.
They seem to discontinue a lot of products, including ones with fairly large user bases. It seems like a valid concern if you're going to try to build something on top of their stuff.
Disclaimer: I work at Google.
It's a major issue for actual deployments of hardware in e.g. medical, education, research settings where a machine may end up supporting a piece of machinery for a couple decades on no support but just some spare duplicate parts that can be swapped in.
I once used a fiber optic splicer at MIT that was 2.5 decades old and ran DOS. Nobody gave a crap that it was DOS. We just needed fibers spliced and a new shiny touch screen splicer would cost $30K.
This however seems to be a product with no SLA and no guarantees, outside of the cloud offerings etc. I kinda agree with OP, Google's track record is bad when it comes to this kind of products.
And yes I think they are worse than other companies. Google isn't a hardware company, so they're worse than apple in that regard. And Amazon would do it through AWS, which would also make this fall inside their core competency.
[1]: https://killedbygoogle.com
[2]: https://gcemetery.co
> It should take about one minute for compilation to complete.
...also, it should take about six months for Google to lose interest in this product, at which point the product you made when you integrated the Edge TPU -- is stuck without updates.