One of the top comments had a reply that mentioned a site that tracked Google retired products[1], so I figured I would take a look to see what portion of them were out of beta. I suspect it's generally beta projects that get retired. Google tends to keep things in beta a long time, but I think that's a somewhat separate problem. I noticed that a lot of the retired products actually have become successful companies:
- Sidewiki - Seems similar to Genius, as it's becoming, where you can annotate any site.
- Jaiku - Micro-blogging and life-streaming, apparently comparable to twitter, founded a month before Twitter was founded, launched the same month Twitter launched.
- Dodgeball - Like Foursquare. It's founder left to form foursquare.
- Sidewiki - Seems similar to Genius, as it's becoming, where you can annotate any site.
- Jaiku - Micro-blogging and life-streaming, apparently comparable to twitter, founded a month before Twitter was founded, launched the same month Twitter launched.
- Dodgeball - Like Foursquare. It's founder left to form foursquare.
I'm sure there's more in there.
1: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/retired-google-projects