Hacker News Reader

Comment by lalos | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft talks the enterprise talk and walks the enterprise walk. Google probably has a fun and hackster image in the eyes of enterprise.

View on HN

I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.

I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

Because businesses fundamentally run on Outlook and Office and support for that has been pretty amazingly consistent.

Yes I've seen SharePoints and Skydrives and OneDrives and Yammers but none of them are critical the way Office and Outlook are

They burned people with their original on-prem OneDrive bullshit.

You can also add Active Directory to that list. Stupid simple to setup, join machines and setup policies. Small businesses with tens of pc's are easily managed from a single domain controller and the licensing isn't that bad when you're revenue easily covers costs.

Oh, and Office 365 is a blessing. I never thought I'd actually like SaaS anything from Microsoft but it works really well Office. It's also much easier than selling a $6000+ purchase req for 15-20 new office licenses. Especially when the boss doesn't see why office 2003 is obsolete in 2011 if it "still works fine for me". ~$240 a month was an easy sell with "free" exchange email and upgrades. Yea small shops are fun to work at.

Like GDI? (Honest question, not much of a graphics coder myself)

You can use GDI and GDI+ on Windows 10 from VS 2017 without a problem.

This is like patents expiring. By the time the patent expires, it's not valuable any more, because the new stuff is superior.

In the MS land, I get to completely rewrite my app, because I need the new hotness, which doesn't work with the old API.

That's because the new hotness is often outright not possible to fit within the constraints of the old API. It's the same on all platforms, really. The difference is that on Windows, you can choose to not chase the new hotness if you don't actually need it.

E.g. there are still people writing WinForms and even MFC apps, because it works for them, and they don't need anything flashy. And that is a fully supported scenario - not just running the old stuff on new platforms, but even writing new code that uses the old frameworks in the latest-and-greatest Visual Studio.

If GDI broke there would be a riot in financial firms.

> I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.

How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows 10 you can still install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartphone and you'll see the difference.

>Windows 10 you can still install 16-bit apps

what? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/896458/64-bit-versi...

They ship 32-bit versions still to support those people. As a former msft engineer it was a huge pain in the ass to have to build the 32-bit version all the time - but customers used and relied on it.

And the technical reason is you cant run NTVDM when the processor is in long mode, because Virtual 8086 Mode cant be run from Long Mode.

I always thought that was a bullshit excuse. They could have emulated it. Its not like 16-bit apps are on the bleeding edge of performance. Still nobody else is supporting 16-bit applications at all anymore so you have to give them credit.

> they could have emulated it

What's the cost/benefit of that? How much would it cost to build it and how much could they make?

You can theoretically do ANYTHING... but a business exists to make money...

Why does Microsoft support 16bit? because - without a doubt - someone is paying them for that "extra" support.

When you make a business decision - don’t pretend it was a technical one. That’s why it’s a bullshit excuse.

"Technical" is part of the excuse... Don't pretend that the "only" reason a company chooses to not do something is "technical".

As I said... there are many reasons - and a company exists to make money.

If they decide not to do something that doesn't make them money? It's not a hard reason to see why...

As someone with a 32-bit Windows 10, thank you!

I have it installed on an old 2006 MacBook, so Microsoft was still providing updates for a 12 year old machine... one that Apple itself abandoned after just 6 years. It's one of my favorite examples of Microsoft's longer support for old hardware.

And for what it's worth, after 12 years and 3 Mac purchases, I've switched & just bought a PC again.

Which one did you buy? Mac's screen, keyboard (old one), trackpad, build and battery life is unmatched as far as I could say. I found mac hardware have much more longer life (even though Apple may not support it for that long)..

I went with a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga. It hasn't arrived yet, so I can't directly compare, but I've tried the keyboard & trackpad in store & they feel about as good as my mid-2012 MacBook Pro. I chose the premium screen upgrade to HDR Dolby Digital 500 nits, 8th-Gen Core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, touchscreen/pen & 3yr Next Day On-site Warranty was $1500 cheaper than a MacBook Pro with the same specs. The Thinkpad X1 has a user replaceable SSD, so I'll upgrade it to 2TB for $1000 cheaper than Apple's SSD upgrades, which are soldered on. I also love the Black, which fits in with my 2006 & 2007 Black MacBooks.

I considered the Surface Book 2, which has an excellent keyboard & trackpad, but the SSD can't be replaced by the user & tops out at 1TB. I was worried about the Surface Book hinge being fragile in my backpack while travelling & commuting.

My 2006, 2007 and even my 2000 Pismo G3 Macs all still work well. I used to love Apple reliability & recommended the Apple Store to everyone, I was that guy who queued for a day-one iPhone 4. But my mid-2012 MacBook Pro (bought in 2015) has been a lemon, the data flex cable keeps failing every few months, causing it to corrupt data & eventually lose the boot drive. (SuperDuper! has been a lifesaver.) Apple have replaced the cable 5 times now, each time with a week of downtime, but the replacement cables all have the same known defect & I just can't trust the machine anymore.

Nice. The touchpad on my 2013 MacBook Pro doesn’t click properly anymore, and I just don’t like the current line. I just bought a ThinkPad X1 Extreme (i7-8850H, 32GB, 1TB, 4K). I’ve been running elementary OS on it, and while it lacks many of the niceties of macOS (especially for owners of multiple Apple devices), it has a familiar and refined feel.

Have anymore thoughts on that? I'm looking to upgrade my old Thinkpad Yoga.

What do you want to know?

I'm pretty pleased with the X1E: it's not quite MBP-level thin, but it's still a great balance of power and portability. NotebookCheck has a review that's worth checking out.

elementary OS feels fast, familiar, and refined. It's not quite as fleshed out as other distros like Mint (or macOS itself, for that matter), but it's getting better with each release.

The 4K HiDPI screen on the X1E is vibrant. My biggest concern was that the HiDPI scaling on Linux wouldn't be up to snuff, but I've been pleasantly surprised. The scaling for GTK apps was perfect right out of the box. There were some extra steps to get Qt apps to scale properly and inherit the GTK theme, but they look great now. Wine and Steam basically just required checking a box to get the scaling to work.

Happy to answer any specific questions you have.

> I’ve been running elementary OS on it...

I'm not much of a Linux user, but I've been trying elementary OS 0.4.1 Loki via Parallels and like it a lot. Unfortunately elementary OS 5 Juno has been buggy for me (random black screens requiring a reboot), so I'm stuck on Loki for now.

I was tempted to put elementary OS on my 32-bit 2006 MacBook (the one that currently has Windows 10), but there isn't a 32-bit version of elementary OS anymore.

Thinkpad Yoga (20CD-S02C00) owner here. 4 years and going strong. People on airplanes perpetually confused by my oversized "tablet" that I switched from coding on to highlighting passages in ebooks with a pen. Battery is finally starting to fail though and even though it's an i7 w/ 8GB RAM it is finally starting to feel "slow".

I'd love to hear your thoughts on battery life doing anything useful (not watching movies) with your new one. I'm debating an X1 Carbon, HP Spectre, or XPS 13 to upgrade to in the next few months.

I've had the X1 Yoga a few days. I haven't done a proper battery test, but I think it will do at least a solid 7 hours of browsing & emailing, and it feels like it will be on par with my MacBook Pro 2012. The 7 hours is a pessimistic estimate - sometimes it bounces up to 10 hours, and I did 2 hours of actual work & the battery only drained to 80%. But if I watch a YouTube video, that estimate drops to 7 hours.

I'm more worried about screen issues. I got the premium HDR Dolby Vision screen, and I love the 500 nits & the wide color gamut is stunning & very OLED-like. But the calibration is off, the screen has a red-tint that hurts my eyes and makes the rest of the world look sickly green when I look away from the screen. I fear I'll have to buy an X-Rite and make my own calibration. It isn't like my Dell monitor, which came individually calibrated & with a printout of the calibration.

Also, this X1 Yoga (or Windows?) does lots of dynamic screen dimming, which was messing with Sublime Text in Monokai (dark) theme. It would dim the screen so much that white text would become mid-grey & it was unreadable & low contrast. I was able to turn that setting off, but doing so has reduced battery life to the numbers you see above.

If having a large / replaceable SSD wasn't a priority (and battery was more of a priority), I think I would very seriously consider the Surface Book 2. But hopefully I'll like the X1 Yoga more as I get used to it.

A lot more function in Wine than in Windows 10.

Not to mention that windows still sticks with carriage return + line feed to maintain compatibility with the 1960s.

Notepad & its underlying text box component support Unix style line endings now.

And then there are things like IE6 that they didn't abandon soon enough.

But they generally still function right? They're just not "the way you should do it anymore".

> I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

I don't like MS (so am not trying to defend them from a partisan PoV) but I believe most of their revenues still come from enterprise, and I think enterprise customers don't encounter the same level of problems.

I guess enterprise trust them because they speak the same language. Also under Nadella's lead Microsoft has shown it can eat it's own dog food and turn it into profit. Turning from a software house into a full cloud business, the so called "digital transformation".

Most of their customers see that and wanna follow the same path.

I am not often a Windows programmer, but I followed that saga. I think it was the result of poor internal communication and was fairly anomalous for Microsoft.

The inability to connect with a real human when escalating Google Cloud issues seems to be recurring theme on HN.

I can’t speak to Azure, but with a business support plan, it’s really easy to connect with a human on AWS. My experience is that they won’t give up until they resolve your issue. They’ve even gone as far as creating a simplified CloudFormation stack to duplicate the issue and then talk to their developers and get back to you.

I have been using Azure and their support is top notch too.

Customer obsession is one of Amazon's primary focus. This isn't just for selling merchandise on retail.

About seven or eight years ago, I tried to migrate my small employer to Microsoft cloud Exchange (email). I forget what they were calling it back then. We were an Outlook shop so MS seemed like the logical choice.

I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night. CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.

Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.

Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.

"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."

Never again.

It was bleeding edge tech; that happens.

Well, sure it was bleeding edge. That's not the point. Bleeding edge doesn't mean that your support has to be completely broken like this.

I wouldn’t call that “completely broken”. You can argue it took too long, or that having to give that advice for the reason given is stupid, or that the customer didn’t want to get that advice, but in the example the customer managed to get through to customer support and got clear, actionable advice.

I frequently read worse on HN about Google, where even reaching tech support can be ‘challenging”, and Apple, where app reviews report issues that developers can’t make heads or tails of.

I have interacted with Apple’s app reviewers for years and never experienced what you’re describing.

It really isn't difficult to search online for stories of people struggling with Apple app reviewers. Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

There are people who have a bad experience and they complain about it on the internet. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just adding the opposite data point.

Sure, "close your account" is actionable, but it's funny to think that it's not a clear sign that their customer support is completely broken. I mean, when you inform a company of a problem and their customer support admits that it's a bug on the company's side, but they can't fix it because they don't have any way to inform the developers from the company in question, how is that not being broken? Customer support should be a filter to the developers, but instead they're a fake door. Despite being a 3rd party, the customer support represents the company. From the customer's side, the company apparently can't communicate with itself. That's completely broken in my book.

> I frequently read worse on HN

Right, that's why it's funny. The bar is very low here, and that's why you can count it as not being completely broken.

> I wouldn’t call that “completely broken”.

The intent of customer services is to retain a customer in the event of problems. "You should close your account" is therefore broken customer service.

History is that when one one uses bleeding edge; good support and/or reliability is relatively rare. Whether it must be that way or if it's just a bad industry habit can be debated. But, if one looks at the history of most very-new tech, it quite often is not reliable regardless of cause. Therefore, you should probably not assume the newest incarnation will not have this problem. I don't have any solid study, but watching the industry for many decades has shown me this pattern. Here is a common saying that I didn't invent: "Never buy version 1.0". (Wow, I got a -3 above. That hurts.)

Email circa 2010 was not bleeding edge technology.

You still can't actually change your billing country in Office 365 without starting over with a new account. Even support can't do it.

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-adm...

What are you talking about? Just make sure you are someone important on social media and create a tweet stir such that some Google execs look at your problem. That's how you get support.

We're a pretty small fish as Google Cloud clients go, but we have honestly not had this problem at all. We get very fast response to support tickets, and on the rare occasions where we've had to escalate they have gone as far as setting up hangouts with senior engineers.

Google, for all their faults, does seem much more interested in soliciting product feedback.

I've never been able to figure out how MS does that, as everything seems to run through an omnipresent offshored L1 support contract. (Aka the "Here's a link to the documentation!" folks)

If you are above a certain size you don't go through that. The big ones all have more direct access.

Also: Partner companies. They have more direct access too.

(GCP employee)

Yes, totally. When I transferred to work on GCP, I was pleasantly surprised at how much eng/product cares about users/developers wants, needs, and feedback.

I'm not that small a fish as far as GCP customers go and 80% of my support experiences have been ridiculous.

20% have been fabulous, so there's that. I'm also still very fond of GCP as I don't rely on support to operate my service.

I've gotten a prompt response from Google Cloud every time I've filed a support request. Then again, my company pays for a support contract with an SLA.

Yeah, that's the catch.

I've been a gmail/drive/GSuite/Chrome/Android user for a long time and of course I use Google for internet searches. I am getting kind of tired of their bullshit though.

However, I have also been a paid Adwords user and it is unbelievably difficult to reach a live support person with AdWords. I finally tracked down the contact page (this is years ago fwiw) and it was so intentionally buried it became quite clear to me that Google was like the anti-Apple regarding technical support.

It would not surprise if they still operate the same way. Part of the problem is that Google is a company which is "too good and too smart" for the mortal masses which comprise their user base.

Yeah. That has been my experience. AWS has way better customer interaction and will refund "small accidents" with credits. Google makes it hard to reach a person and won't budge at all on similar issues. On the flip side, the documentation on Google Cloud seems a lot better than AWS.

Product has their lifecycle. Nothing lives forever even for AWS/Azure.

In GCP, if a product is GA, deprecation got announced ahead of time and customers got notified and workarounds generally there.

Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing. (I really think that Google should name Google Cloud something else under Alphabet.)

I would add that AWS seems to moth-ball projects, where Google would officially announce an end-of-life. For example, I strongly regretted using AWS OpsWorks after I realized the only priority for AWS seemed to be keeping it running under SLA.

If we're going to talk about "mothball without formally announcing deprecation" Microsoft is pretty awful for that too. There are so many zombie libraries and frameworks and tools in the Microsoft family, and they never have the decency to say "stop using that". Even windows.forms was default in visual studio until like 2013 or so.

Windows Forms were also the only sensible option until at least 2014. Only after 2014 Microsoft has fully commited to one solution, before that it was very wild.

What is that solution? You're not talking about UWP, in it's myriad and shifting incarnations, are you?

To be honest I don't have much insight anymore, I left the .NET space around 2015 for these exact reasons.

I'm convinced that as long as there is a Windows operating system based on the Win32 API, WinForms cannot die.

It's still the nicest and most productive way to build GUI apps I've seen. Maybe not the prettiest, but it just works.

Not only will it not die, they are porting it over to .Net Core - Windows only.

You should definitely give WPF a try. At least for me Windows Forms is way less productive and nice.

ever try QT or popular CEF based (actually, web-based) solution?

actually, I'm wondering at current moment, what's the choice of framework / OS to make a productive GUI?

or just fire those claimed-designer guy (probally your boss) let engineer do there job?

Front-end web development of all stripes can burn in a fire, in my opinion; it's got the complication bug, and there's no cure. Unfortunately that's not going to happen, because worse is better, so here we are.

QT looks interesting, if I ever had to care about supporting Linux, but that's not my world.

or how about let's go retro for all, try use command line / ncurse!

(.....And of course get cursed by your manager and boss)

> Even windows.forms was default in visual studio until like 2013 or so.

They are also bringing WinForms and WPF forward to work on .NET Core 3.0; and its still supported https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/10/04/update-on...

Nothing lives forever even for AWS/Azure.

Maybe not forever, but some things do live for a very long time. Amazon SimpleDB has been deprecated for over 5 years and Amazon works hard to discourage people from using it in any new applications... but it's still available and will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.

And if you have a really old account you can still use an instance outside of a VPC. I’ve never heard of any service that AWS has just outright abandoned.

We have a really old account, we still create instances in classic to this day. Every now and then we get some really bizarre problems that could be attributed to "account is ancient".

I used to teach AWS courses and had the same experience. I haven't heard of any service that has been disabled for an existing account.

Yes, you are strongly discouraged from using some services (simple db) by them hiding it. Yes, new accounts can't use certain services (ec2 classic). Yes, some old features cost more than newer better features (rrs s3).

But I wasn't able to point to any AWS service that had been shut down.

BTW, if someone can, would love to hear about it.

Also, to be fair, I don't know of any Google Cloud Service that has been shut down (as opposed to consumer facing Google services), but haven't been paying as much attention to that service.

> Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing.

Now watch as i consider them the same thing.

Personal anecdote: I had some basic question about their usage policy/pricing for one of their api's that was unclear in the docs. To get it answered by a real person was basically impossible. Our company does have a support contract, but only the person who controls the account is able to contact them. So to answer my simple question about making sure our usage was in-line with policy I'd have to go bug the bosses boss to ask them to forward my question to support and play the telephone game back and forth trying to interpret the answers.

Or try to contact sales since that's the only real person I could reach and have them answer my carefully and precisely worded question with a sales pitch.

Though, fwiw, we have been continuing to move stuff to gcp/gke despite my annoyances, and I do generally hold a positive view of the product.

I see the same thing, it was also IBM's cloud services pitch that they "understood the enterprise" better than Google or Amazon does.

It is a pain to try to compare stuff though because there aren't good standards for "cloud revenue." According to [1] IBM generated $18.5B over 12 months in cloud revenue. While Forbes[2] talks about $6.1B and $6.9B in quarterly cloud revenue of Amazon and Microsoft (a $24 - $28B annual run rate), and this from Forbes[3] in April of this year that has them at $44B(Amazon), $19B (Microsoft), and $17B (Google). Which would make Google #4 if IBM's numbers hold up under scrutiny.

I try to keep an eye on these numbers to maintain a sense of the shifting landscape, and it doesn't seem like Google has yet found the right combination of goods and services to really be solid in this space yet.

[1] https://www.lightreading.com/enterprise-cloud/infrastructure...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/08/03/1-microsof...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/04/30/cloud-r...

IMO AWS is the true king — the Microsoft numbers are spiked by Office 365 licenses, most of which is renting Office itself. Amazon is the only one not playing games with definitions.

IBM is very vague, and I would guess that they are recharacterizing traditional software sales as private cloud by giving away cloud management components.

Google historically had a strange attitude towards enterprise sales and truely and royaly screwed over their search appliance customers for reasons that baffle the mind. They seem to investing, and hopefully don’t repeat those mistakes.

> truely and royaly screwed over their search appliance customers

Got context? Are you referring to the (still ongoing!) deprecation of hardware search appliances as announced in 2016?

Office 365 licenses are reported with traditional Office licenses. It is an entirely separate unit from Cloud revenue.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2018-Q4...

IBM is mostly selling cloud services tacked on to their services projects.

Don’t forget the rapid and severe Google maps price increases. These are the gift that will keep on giving for Microsoft and Amazon in the mindshare of developers and business leaders.

Incredibly stupid move.

I N C R E D I B L Y stupid move @google

I have to thank Google for that, it was probably the quickest way to drive more competition in the maps space.

Am not too well-read on this - what are some good AWS/MS alternatives to Google Maps?

Do most enterprise companies care about the price of Google Maps? My company hosts on AWS, Azure and GCP, and I couldn't tell you how much Google Maps costs (or indeed, that there was even a paid tier, though it makes sense for embedded maps and such).

Today's developer is tomorrow's enterprise architect.

I've created an account to try Azure last weekend, it took me 2 hours to sign-up due to issues in the registration on their end, and then once it finally worked, I copied an example from their documentation. 5 minutes after, I received an email that I was banned for "security reasons", so yeah if they can't even handle a sign-up properly, I wonder how they want to reach the top spot of the cloud market, I'll for sure try to avoid Azure in the future for any company I go.

The AWS console is far from being great but last time I used Azure’s it was terribly slow and full of little bugs. The UI was kind of flashy and hip and combined with the bugs it made them seem silly, especially contrasted against the AWS console’s utilitarian look. It was painful. I’m not saying I’ll never try it again but I’d need to be convinced.

I totally agree with that, during the small amount of time I had access I found that the UI clearly has some issues. It's clunky, slow and difficult to navigate. AWS isn't exactly a great model of good UI but Azure is clearly even worse, I would personally put GCP in the top spot for the UI and Azure as the last one.

Agreed. GCP UI is... Actually usable. There are cases where I prefer that to the UI or API.

I remember seeing Google folks in Japan coming to sell their products in T shirts and jeans in a business world where everyone wears suits and knows it. I have nothing against the casual style, but knowing the etiquette is primordial in business.

Dawut? For real?

I honestly cannot imagine the words ‘sales’ and ‘no suit’ together in a sentence anywhere in the world, much less Japan.

I’m not even Japanese and I think by now I’d consider it more or less an insult.

It depends. At my company (70,000+ employees the last time I checked) even the CEO doesn't wear a tie, much less a suit (usually he wears a t-shirt and jeans). A sales guy wearing so much as a tie would not be taken seriously.

When they go to visit clients? In the office I can understand.

Absolutely. I work in global sales for my company. No sales person would be caught dead wearing a tie or suit.

In the Nordics few salespeople wear suit (especially in tech)

Maybe they did not mean it as an insult, they just came in their everyday working clothes I guess. The problem is that looked super unprofessional and left the impression to be a bunch of hipsters. After all, they are the image of the company, and dressing so casually in front on your client is... disturbing.

Oh, I’m sure of that. I doubt anyone would deliberately ruin their sales prospects. But knowing it and feeling it are two completely different things.

When was this? Was it an event or an onsite client visit? Was it for cloud or a different product?

That was about 3 years ago or maybe 2. They came to showcase their solutions to the Marketing department. I dont think it was Cloud, they were focusing if I remember correctly on the Google Analytics Entreprise plan and its benefits. I cant remember the details of the presentation but I remember vividly the holes in their jeans in front of a well dressed audience.

Thank you for answering succinctly.

I've had an absolutely terrible experience with Azure support and I've worked on environments that have the highest level of support enabled.

Amazon is so much better in my experience when it comes to supporting their platform.

That and the fact you can speak to engineers at Microsoft will relative ease. Recently had an Azure support ticket open. The whole process was beyond my expectations to the point I'd have difficulty putting anything big anywhere else. Could be personal preference, but the way they manage introducing new services and grandfathering old ones is also very good.

Where are you getting this "price hike" narrative for Google from? Google's presence in the cloud market is instrumental in across the board price drops.

Google Maps left probably thousands of small, barely viable projects with their shorts down and no belt.

Google maps is NOT a part of Google cloud!

https://cloud.google.com/products/

This is not correct: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/

Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform, despite now integrating with Google Cloud Platform's web console for purposes of managing billing and API keys. Yes, this is a branding and communication mess, but nevertheless true.

You seem to be correct.

> Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform

I have never felt that I have been confused by something so justifiably.

(googler working in gcp here)

The basic way to tell if something is part of GCP or another Google product that some marketing whiz managed to have "cloud" tacked onto the name is whether or not you need a GCP project to work with it.

Do you not for Maps? All my API keys are lumped under "test_prjoect_1" for me, which I don't even remember creating.

(GCP employee)

Not true, as far as I know. Many (if not all) Google APIs require a GCP project for access via API key, service account credential, or mobile application.

No argument here on that point!

I'll defend many things about the technical quality of GCP and its appropriateness as a viable choice in many cases, but not Google's branding, external PR, or external perception management.

They've always been bad in those areas and that pattern continues.

(Relevant disclosure I've said in other comments: I used to work for Google, including GCP, ending in 2015. I've never worked for Google PR/comms/marketing and I don't work or speak for Google now.)

Funny how everyone here complains about Google maps changing their licensing, but nobody brings up MS changing changing from per socket to per core licensing a few years ago. That burned several medium businesses I know.

Per socket vs per core happened with a version bump right? If Google maps pricing changes only happened when you used a new api, and you could keep using your existing code with your existing prices, that would be a lot less grudge worthy.

Are you talking about SQL Server? You can keep using old versions, and the performance improvements of modern hardware and new versions end up providing more value overall.

With Maps, there's suddenly a new price and you have no options.

Also Windows and System Center. It’s very painful for Microsoft shops as many applications really need standalone SQL.

With our scaled up SCCM environment, SQL alone increased licensing cost by a very significant factor, as you need to license SQL Enterprise when you exceed the core limits of the gratis SQL Standard license.

Probably not a lot of people used Microsoft services then.

Probably from the AppEngine change of almost a decade ago or the double Maps bumps (the big shrinking of the free tier years ago, then another one in 2018). Usually those are adjustments to make prices match reality.

Google also puts a lot of weight in certain nuances that get overlooked and then quickly forgotten in the Internet's memory.

Your first example: App Engine price hike happened when App Engine departed preview, not after the service had already been intended for mission-critical production use.

Your second example: what they're now calling Google Maps Platform has never been part of Google Cloud Platform, is only relatively recently in a nearby part of the org chart & branding structure (aka Google Cloud which also includes Chrome and Android and G Suite), and has never been subjected to the Google Cloud Platform Deprecation Policy.

Yes, this is a communication failure on Google's part and I'm not blaming the Internet for the common misimpression. But Google's substantive actions in these price changes can be distinguished from how they approach generally available and policy-covered services within GCP, and customers can plan on that basis. (Similarly with G Suite - one should plan differently for core G suite services covered by the G Suite terms and SLA, as compared to other additional Google services that one might use with G Suite.)

Yeah, that stuff isn't part of Google Cloud Platform.

But trust in the stability of products can't be siloed that easily.

With different communication that's harder to misunderstand, it would have been possible for Google to get a much better trust and expectations outcome from exactly the same substantive price changes (at least for GAE and GCP if not Maps).

I think we're mostly or entirely agreeing?

The cloud service price changes maybe. But I'm more focused on things like maps, and the services they shut down.

They can make statements about which things have promises and which don't, but it still causes worry until there's a really good track record.

Yeah. I'm saying that Google Cloud Platform (which does not include Maps) has a good track record with respect to their generally available services, as does G Suite with respect to their core G Suite services. Hell, even G+ isn't going anywhere for G Suite accounts (the turndown is only for consumers).

To be clear I'm not pretending that they've shut down as few things as Amazon (looking at you SimpleDB), but within the product area and lifecycle categories I indicated, they've stayed within what is perfectly viable for lots of companies.

Well, yes, I didn't mention that when GAE launched in preview mode, there was nothing exactly like it, so it had an initial pricing model that made intuitive sense (CPU-based), but was flawed: RAM was much more representative of the actual costs behind the service. I only hinted at that when I mentioned reality.

The Google Maps API is a good example. They increased prices by an order of magnitude while simultaneously decreasing the free tier with one month's notice. [0]

[0] http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...

> every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated

Indeed! Just ~~~last month~~~ 62 months ago they shut down Reader.

(I see that you're hedging with the reference to Maps. But I'd love if this time, we wouldn't make a single event a 10-year talking point)

Google Reader still hurts.

That one hurt, but "single event" is a little off. Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon... (nearly a hundred in 12 years, is the answer to the question "how many then?")

Google Reader is like "the one that got away" because the landscape changed so fundamentally with it, that no other product could take its place.

If Google had killed Gmail we would still have Yahoo mail and Hotmail and what not. We would bitch and moan but life would go on. Reader was... different.

I know I'm unlikely ever to trust Google's cloud offerings simply because of their track record of support/service, or rather lack of it. Yes, even for paying customers who paid them payments by paying.

"Oops, the algorithm decided to wipe out your business. No, you can't talk to a human. No, you can't appeal it and there's no review, and we can't tell you why, because the algorithm said so" is something Google has gotten away with for years with many of their services. But it's going to wreck them as they keep moving into spaces where people expect a level of support commensurate with the amount of money they're paying. Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.

If you pay for their enterprise level support for GCP you can get human responses very easily (and quickly on high priority requests) though they tend to have to escalate and complicated issues to their engineering teams. We also have weekly meetings with their CRE team where we can give general input, make feature requests and get support requests/etc expedited as needed.

Their support for small customers could use some improving but their enterprise support is nothing like you describe.

Again:

Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.

GCP may overcome the bad reputation if many satisfied customers speak up, like your parent post has done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com