* Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google
* most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP
* A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk
* Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere).
It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.
