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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Wait, isn't this particular problem solved with something like Google Sheets?

Other than privacy issues of course.

And you might want to still use it in x years time after Google decides to kill-off Sheets. You must be very wary when building anything on a Google service.

And what happens if Keikai fails long before Google gets rid of sheets? I get that Google has a habit of killing things off, but they are often things that are unpopular. Sheets is far from unpopular.

Yep, I agree it's always a risk; but if you were really concerned you could perhaps acquire a small outfit like Keikai and protect yourself. Your money just isn't interesting to Google so that's never an option.

And I don't believe it's true to say they've only killed unpopular things. Anything outside of the core business (and I will argue Sheets/Docs is outside) is up for the chop.

>but if you were really concerned you could perhaps acquire a small outfit like Keikai and protect yourself

Only one customer can do that, not all of them. As a small provider of enterprise software I would offer to sign a source code escrow agreement.

Yes, that's a far better way to protect your investment. Thanks for pointing that out.

So 4 million G Suite business customers and 70 million educational G Suite customers is outside the core business? I would say 74 million customers is a major part of any business.

G Suite is a lot more than just Google Sheets. And while it's not advertising, I think you are right and I was a bit hasty to declare it as outside their core business.

They do not have 74 million paying customers. However, I agree that the "free" version is safe for as long as the enterprise offering continues to do well (5 million PAYING users as of Feb 2019: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/5-million-and...).

Before Sheets was acquired by Google it was known as XL2Web, and it was strikingly similar to this. I can't find a lot of press, but see [0], for example - basically the same article, just with 2004-isms like using XML.

0: https://www.eweek.com/it-management/xl2web-package-lives-up-...

Not all websites are for general public application.

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