If they ever do deprecate something people have built on though they're gonna get absolutely crucified. That's probably better protection than any terms of service.
They do this all the time, and they get crucified every time. I built a Google Hangout App and a Chrome App, both of which were platforms eventually shut down.
This is where the meme came from, and it's why I personally stopped building on top of Google products. A 1-year deprecation policy is no assurance to me if I plan for my app to live longer than that.
By the way that GCP is so full of loopholes where Google can get out of its obligations its laughable. So it's not even that clear cut that the GCP is really a better alternative.
And even when it turns out to be legally sound, when stuff like this happens, who's going to sue google over it? Nobody, and they know it.
But as I say in another comment, the contract is less important than both trust and reality. Keep in mind nobody focuses on how AWS doesn't even have a public deprecation policy.
I'm right there with many people in this thread in agreeing that Google has a trust problem, due mostly to real perception issues stemming from Google's habits outside GCP, which can and do impact people's perceptions of what they'll do with GCP.
The reality of what Google has done and will do with GCP, though, is pretty good. Sure they do sometimes deprecate things in ways Amazon never would. But not nearly as often or as abruptly as they do on the consumer side - that would be commercial suicide - and they do other things better than Amazon. Tradeoffs.
No. It's just words. Actions speak louder than words. Googles' actions in the last couple of days spoke pretty loud. No amount of words will change that.
Are you working for Google PR or something?
I'm still a fan of GCP as a suite of products and services, as much as I recognize many of Google's organizational failings and disagree with plenty of their product decisions in other areas of Google.
Google (including GCP) has been bad at external communication as long as I've paid attention, and that includes external communications around incidents. What actions are you referring to, beyond poor and confusing communication (i.e. words) around what is or isn't broken or fixed at what points during the incident? That's most of the problem I'm aware of from this incident.
With that said, part of the reason people notice GCP's outages more than AWS's is that GCP publicly notes their outages way more than AWS does. In other words, among the outages that either cloud has, Google much more often creates an incident on their public status page and Amazon much more often fails to.
My "reality of [...] GCP" comment was about the bigger picture of the cloud platform offering, not any one specific incident.
If a service Google runs is losing money, what reason would they have to not shut it down?
If I pay you for a service that would take time to migrate off of, and you are making money off me now, I am going to be ripshit if you decide to just turn it off because it's suddenly not making money for you in the short term. Google's done this a lot, and the fact that don't provide concrete time lines in their contract gives even less reason to trust them
People look at AWS's track record, and trust that. People look at Google's track record, overlook what to an inside-the-company Googler perspective are dramatically significant organizational boundaries or product lifecycle definitions that are very poorly communicated outside the company, mentally apply reputational damage from one part of Google (or from a preview-stage GCP product) to a different part of the company (or to a generally available GCP product), and don't trust that.
Google has always been worse at externally facing PR than at the internal reality, even when I worked there (2011-2015). Major company weakness.
But the internal reality inside GCP, perceptions aside, is pretty good even now.
If it's costing them money they haven't figured out a model, yet, that works in their favour.