Are Cloud and Domains special-case product protected from closure? How do I as an outsider know which Google products have this protection?
As an outsider, you would know from the terms of service: https://cloud.google.com/terms/
7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if it intends to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to the Services specified at the URL in the next sentence. Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate those Services versions and features identified at https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation without these changes for at least one year after that announcement, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):
(i) required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or
(ii) doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.
The above policy is the "Deprecation Policy."
If you click through to https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation you will see the covered services. (Reasonable good faith is a legal term of art, so no, Google would not get away with whatever silly edge case people come up with)
That isn't the standard listed. It's "substantial economic burden".
None of those services were a substantial economic burden for a many-billion dollar company, so sorry, but i completely disagree.
For smaller companies if something becomes too expensive or hard, they just go out of business. For larger companies, they have to draw the line somewhere. You won't get stronger guarantees from anyone, that would be insane.
Google definitely has a history of turning down free services when they're proving unprofitable, but that's only free services. There's no history of Google turning down paid services without good notice that I know of.
Point being; the only guarantees that any consumers should hold companies accountable to is: Does the product make money, and is it parallel to their conceivable long-term vision? That's literally all that matters. That's the only data consumers can use to decide whether a product will still exist in 10 years.
Google Cloud is this. Its absolutely profitable. And cloud tech is so deep in their DNA, they're literally decades ahead of anyone else. They were running containers and clusterized homogeneous server resource pools 8 years before anyone else knew to call them that, its just taking them time to productize everything they use internally.
Trust money. Trust vision. Don't trust words. G-Suite, Cloud, and Domains are very safe products.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17997494
No, it wouldn't require them to keep it operating if all of Google was simultaneously destroyed by meteors. But it would probably allow lawsuits against Google if they didn't give the required advance notice merely due to a change in business strategy, without a sufficient reason.
Interestingly, AWS doesn't have that kind of guarantee, though they do have a long public cloud track record of not turning stuff down.
You make a lot of additional good points about why these Google products are safe.
I'm not convinced I'd put Domains in that list, and for G Suite and GCP I'd only put the core services (G Suite jargon) and GA offerings (GCP jargon). Plus some other services under those umbrellas if Google has told you something about their plans under NDA, which they do for many customers.
But Google reliably provides transition plans and data exports if they do turn anything down, and I expect that will continue.
(Disclosure: I formerly worked for Google and GCP in particular, but no more recently than early 2015 and I have no current insider info.)
One year is way too short as well. Enterprise application development does not happen at that speed . Teams and budgets are not readily available to start migration to something equivalent just coz Google felt like it.
Even if that's not a problem migration may not even possible with proprietary APIs. You may have to deprecate entire fearures. If your SLA is longer and reasonable time to your customers, you are screwed.
Google is a public company and as such they are required to release certain information in annual report, so their investment in the cloud is verifiable.
Not an insider, but TBH, I was always pretty much sure that one of Gmail or Inbox will go away soon. With Gmail having more user base, it was natural for Inbox to be subsumed by gmail.
Inbox was not really fundamentally different from Gmail. It offered some new features, but I can't imagine that it would be too hard to implement them in Gmail too (e.g., snooze feature).
I disagree, and suspect that anyone else that used custom bundles would too.
This guy sums it up well: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/09/12/google-may-push-peo...
It's much easier than developing and maintaining 2 apps, and testing them on variety of platforms (Web, ios, android etc.) and device/browser combinations.
It was already getting confusing with smart compose (https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/subject-write-emails-...) coming to Gmail, but not to Inbox.