Disagree. What is good and often necessary for a start-up is not automatically necessary for a mammoth like Google. If you take all brain power of Google and focus it on Google plus, you get overheating, overengineering and other evils. The mammoth should have expandable parts, forgotten corners, people paid to do obscure work. They can't be a bunch of guerrilla teams and should do with it.
I get your sentiment, I find it depends entirely on the context. I don't think about it from a standpoint of focusing resources on a consolidated number of projects, but rather moving on to either expansions of those existing efforts or entirely new ones unto themselves.
A lot of that certainly depends on how they manage those things going forward. Ideally, these types of steps aren't surprises that come from some unknown management decision from on high, but a natural course of progression in project lifecycles.
I prefer the notion of sun-setting services if there is nothing left to learn from their creation/existence.
