Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrosett | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that's already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when they'll abandon cloud. How could anyone in their right mind start building on GCP? They may as well shut it down today.

View on HN

Maybe this helps GCP as the leak now makes this reputational for GOOG. They’ll have to keep it running to prevent people leaving because of the leak so they’ll do something drastic like pledge 10 years of support or something.

This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stuff better and I think Microsoft has bet the whole company on azure).

It always seems to me Google won the Search Engine battle, ads became their revenue source, and that is it. Android came out of necessity and stupidity of Microsoft at the time.

Comparatively speaking they are incompetent both Technically and Manageability, compared to Amazon and Azure, or to better phase it compared to Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella.

It remains to be seen now Google CEO Sundar Pichai, now also Alphabet CEO will change. ( I could never understand how Google Cloud also had a CEO )

Google could very well be a one hit wonder. Coming from someone who works at a company with one successful product and many failed ones: Maybe they are too wealthy to want a second success. Life is cozy.

In addition to search I'd say:

  - Gmail

  - Android (and Google Play)

  - Drive

  - Maps

  - Chromecast

  - Google Home
  
  - YouTube (+Premium)

are super successful.

There's no evidence that YouTube is profitable[1]. In fact, there's no evidence any of this is profitable.

Android, Gmail, and Maps make money from ads, not from charging users directly. That makes them the same business as search.

Hardware businesses like Home and Chromecast usually aren't profitable, and Google (like Amazon) is likely using them to keep people in their ecosystem.

That leaves Drive, which might have some good margins, but they give it away for free to many users...

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/technology/youtube-financ...

Every day that Youtube exists without competitors it further solidifies itself as the only video platform like itself that will exist.

Gmail makes money from business users and I would go as so far to say that if it doesn't make more money that Drive now it will make more money in 10 years from people who have lived their entire lives inside of a gmail account using it for business.

Gmail makes money from enterprises that use Gsuite.

It said in the article G Suite might account for the bulk of Google Clouds revenue, since its combined in their financial reports with the infrastructure stuff and G Suite is extremely popular.

If the metric for success is revenue then, no, they are not by any sensible measure super successful. Their revenue combined it’s a small fraction of search/ads.

By that standard, practically all other companies are failures, since practically all other companies pale in comparison to Google search. So I would say your claim is absurd.

How much money have they made off of Chromecast?

I'm not sure, but as of 2017 55 million Chromecast devices had reportedly been sold:

https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/04/google-has-sold-55-millio...

Anecdotally it's pretty popular with folks I know in Columbus, OH - admittedly they tend to be on the tech savvy side.

Units sold != success. Moviepass had a heck of a sales run without ever being successful.

> Maybe this helps GCP as the leak now makes this reputational for GOOG.

Nope. Engineers know this product is dead. There's no way they'll risk their time and money on something Google doesn't believe in. We've been bitten time and time again, and adopting GCP is about the riskiest move you can make: hitching your entire project to a dying technology platform.

Since no one will be willing to make this gamble, GCP's growth rate will flatline. Exactly the condition Google said would cause them to shutter it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Their platform just died today.

It's sad, because Spanner is actually really cool tech.

I bet Google engineers and PMs on GCP are reading this right now and already thinking about their future within the company.

In the future, we'll probably be able to look back at today as a major shift in strategy for Google.

Yup, best time to eat at Jack n' the Box is right after the ecoli scare.

>pledge 10 years of support or something.

Totally gonna believe them

No they won't. This is ridiculous hyperbole. They've barely shuttered any real enterprise projects and even those were miniscule in usage.

Google is a trillion-dollar company and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads platform. It's not going anywhere.

> No they won't [shutter GCP]. This is ridiculous hyperbole.

From the article:

> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely

That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.

I suspect this is down to how it's phrased by someone who may not be familiar with strategic planning.

It's common for businesses to work out several scenarios and estimate their outcomes. Then you look at the investment outcomes of those scenarios.

So quite plausibly there might have been these scenarios:

1. Invest More + High Growth

2. Invest More + Low Growth

3. Maintain Investment + High Growth

4. Maintain Investment + Low Growth

5. Divest

You pretty much always want to canvass the option to quit a business. You need it to keep your other estimates honest. Anything else is not only giving into sunk cost fallacy, it's flat out denying its existence.

So rejecting "Divest" doesn't mean it was ever a serious contender. It may be there mostly in the interests of completeness.

I can’t imagine Amazon execs having a discussion about getting out of the cloud business.

But Google doing it seems totally believable.

See the problem?

Dude, You're comparing apples and oranges. It makes no sense to compare GCP in 2017/2018 which is when the article refers to this conversation to AWS which predates it by 10 years. You don't think that AWS execs and Amazon execs had conversation about profitability in 2006?

AWS started 13 years ago, in 2006, with S3.

GCP started 11 years ago, 2008, with App Engine.

No, AWS and Amazon leaders did not even remotely discuss that possibility 2 years ago...

Google has offered cloud computing with the release of app engine almost a decade ago. They kept it running this whole time and have only added to the platform.

The entire discussion in the memo seems to be more about how much they want to compete at the level of AWS rather than being in cloud computing at all.

Based on the developments and investment so far, it’s clear GCP wants to be a serious contender.

Again, having the option numbers crunched is not the same as discussing it or seriously considering it. "Quit" and "Do Nothing" should always be included in scenario planning. Especially the latter, because by ordinary momentum it's usually what happens.

I expect Amazon plans have included scenarios such as "quit machine learning" and "don't invest in on-premise units".

Why so much significance to such a minor line in a meeting years ago? What about the part where it was dismissed? Or does that part not matter?

I don't know how else to explain this. AWS and Azure are massive profit centers and GCP is slowly catching up. Cloud computing, machine learning, big data, IoT, and more have trillions in potential market cap.

It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big with this much investment already will exit that opportunity.

> It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big with this much investment already will exit that opportunity.

Most big corporations will exit any market, no matter how big if that market does not turn a profit.

Cloud computing is massively profitable.

For amazon maybe, with their thrifty leader JB but i don't think Google's datacenters are exactly cheap.

Interestingly we don’t even know if Azure is making a lot of money because Microsoft obscures it even harder than Google in their financial reports.

Microsoft has one hell of an enterprise sales and marketing machine though, probably the best in the world, so I’d assume they are doing quite well, even if they are mostly reinvesting it.

Is it for them, though? Sounds like it isn't, unless they can get to #2, hence the urgency.

Which as per my previous comment, should mean companies profiting from cloud will continue to profit from cloud.

>> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely

> That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.

I fail to see how this is even a reason to get off GCP, yet a good one.

The fact that it was on the table indicates that it could be on the table again at some point in the future. These are the wrong signals to send.

Nobody sent these signals. It was a minor discussion a long time ago. The billions in investment and growth of the platform are the exact opposite signal.

You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.

The article does not make it out to be a minor discussion and it was only 18 months ago, hardly 'a long time'. To me it is quite shocking that as short as 18 months ago Google would still consider pulling out of the market but then again, that is exactly the same play they did with other products so it probably should not surprise me.

> The billions in investment and growth of the platform are the exact opposite signal.

At Google's level I would not expect less than billions in investment, the growth of the platform is for now still substantially lagging behind the competition as far as I know, the bulk of the companies I look at are solidly in the AWS camp or in some cases running on Azure, Google is still the exception but getting more common over time. I look at about 50 companies / year so that's a relatively small sample but they are typically well funded start-ups or later stage established companies.

> You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.

No, that's not how I'm reading it.

The fact that it was mentioned in a meeting doesn't mean it was on the table. I'd more concerned with management if they weren't talking about exit points for a risky venture. A perfectly necessary point of consideration and I don't doubt that the same topic came up at Amazon and Microsoft.

For Google, if this is still a 'risky venture' then they are simply in the wrong business, they have the scale and should be able to offer their infrastructure at a cost that is quite profitable. There is plenty wrong with Amazon but they have never ever given off signals that they might withdraw their infrastructure offerings from the market. Microsoft also hasn't but then again, they do have a history of launching stuff and withdrawing it again (Xbox the notable exception, that took forever to take off and they stuck with it). Google has taken products off the market not because they weren't profitable but because they weren't profitable enough. That's the nightmare of early infrastructure adopters who will - by that time - be bound hand and feet.

If you're in competition with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and you intend to go after the same customer profiles then you would do well to ensure that your messaging is what those customers expect and that every outward signal you give is that you're in it for the long haul, with a much longer horizon than the companies that are going to be your customers can oversee so that the trust becomes implicit.

That way if some internal document gets released it doesn't look as though you are still undecided.

Anyway, no need to take my word for this, let's just see how it plays out in the longer term.

Agreed.

Google obviously has a firm grip on what they’re willing to call unacceptable losses for an investment, but they need to realise that there is reputation damage every time they axe one of these projects that they don’t seem to be accounting for at all in their decision-making.

How about the leak where they were debating killing it off?

I was thinking of both of those (considering killing it + the 2023 deadline) as a single leak.

Someone re-titled this HN post to be way more pro-Google.

What was the original title? This comment chain reads a little confusing now.

Something along the lines of "Google execs considered cutting GCP, later decided to set 2023 as a deadline for improved financial performance."

A few months ago, someone I know who is close to the issue mentioned something along these exact lines to me. I shortly moved all of my GCP projects to a self-hosted server. Glad I did it.

I'm curious what sorts of things you had running and how complex moving off was. I'd expect any cut to have some announcement period, which I'd expect to be longer than a few months, so you may not have needed to migrate so soon.

Agreed, this is a disaster. A lot of leaks simply don't matter all that much-- Apple might get annoyed at iPhone leaks, but they probably don't affect sales one bit-- but this is dead serious.

I hope Google's C-suite is treating this article as the PR equivalent of a Sev-1 servers-on-fire emergency, because it is. If they don't come out swinging today and announcing that they're all-in on GCP for the long haul, it's toast. It may be toast even if they do.

Urs, as is typical, responded to the concern prior to the emergency: https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1187607276988723200?s=19

Someone needs to invent an adblock for stupid meme gifs. That page is fucking unreadable, holy cow.

e: nm :)

It’s an industry standard term: https://response.pagerduty.com/before/severity_levels/

Cloud is making a bank for Google and growing triple digits YOY. They are not abandoning it. They do want to pass the competition, obviously.

Stadia would probably crumble alongside GCP by necessity too, right?

Stadia will be gone long before 2023.

You're not wrong

Stadia is a brute force attempt to grow GCP revenue

The Stadia pro tier fee is just $9.99/mo. The GPU and CPU you could consume playing a AAA game on that (yes, even on the purported "medium" settings) for just a few hours a day surely far exceeds what it could be sold for wholesale.

They don't have to match what it would be sold for wholesale though, just need to match the marginal cost. A graphics card that can run a AAA game is less than $500, so I don't think they are losing much on $9.99 a month. That's over $100 a year, and if each users plays 3 hours a day you can have 8 users using the same hardware at different times.

Now I don't think they are using consumer hardware, and there are other costs as well, but it seems realistic that they are making money off of it.

That's assuming people play games in well-defined shifts. I find it more likely to have 8 users play between 8pm and 11pm and zero users for the rest of the day.

Time zones are a thing.

Games are latency sensitive and thus region sensitive. Multiplexing opportunities here are poor. Stadia is a terrible idea business-wise as Google has defined it.

I'm on the fence on Stadia - compute hardware prices keep dropping like a rock. What if we see viable $200 gaming rigs in 10 years? But I digress

Google can utilize dark GPU hardware for numerous tasks. For example, YouTube video transcoding, ML, and Cloud batch processing.

> What if we see viable $200 gaming rigs in 10 years?

Games, like websites, seem to expand to fit the available space. Today's smartphones would beat a ten year old mega-powered gaming PC.

Our two positions are not mutually exclusive. The price of even a top-line gaming rig could drop significantly over the next 10-20 years.

Latency is, too, especially in things like first person shooters. Someone in LA doesn't want to be using surplus GPUs in NY for Call of Duty.

Sure, but if they can spot-price other loads on them the rest of the time, I could see it working out.

But they don't, that's the point.

Don't forget weekends vs weekdays.

Don't forget that they're selling the games, too--and some Stadia games are up to $10 more (!) than their non-Stadia counterparts.

(Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)

> (Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)

That is a factually incorrect statement. You lose access to any games you claimed for free as a benefit of your Stadia Pro membership if you cancel your membership; you regain access to those games if you renew, but you will not gain access to games that were offered for free during any interval where you were not a subscriber.

You retain access to any game you paid for, _even_ if you paid a discounted rate as a result of being a Stadia Pro member, even if your subscription is canceled.

>That is a factually incorrect statement.

Oh, so if I cancel my Stadia subscription I can still play the games?

TLDR: Yes.

As far as I can tell from [1] the situation is:

* Per-game purchase price.

* There's a free 1080p streaming tier.

* There's a $10/mo 4k streaming tier, which also includes discounts on games and some free games.

* However, you won't be able to convert your Stadia-purchased games into local games or Steam codes.

* And of course you won't be able to close your Stadia/Google account and still keep your games.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-06-06-google-stadia-...

Thanks for the info. I've been considering a new console purchase and had basically ruled out Stadia immediately due to the subscription requirement. This changes things a bit but I still don't like the fact that I can't play something without a connection to the big Google. I suppose this is just what it feels like to be part of a generation falling out of the marketing window.

Will account closure or suspension of other google services result in loss of access like the stories we've seen for Gmail?

> (Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)

What. The. Fuck.

First, they took our physical games and media away. Then they made us subscribe. Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our subscriptions? I can't even conceive of what the next step will be -- will they charge us for having memories of their IP?

We need to reduce copyright terms and kill this cancer of IP hoarding. The rent-seekers are taking ownership away.

> Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our subscriptions?

They take away the games you claimed as a Pro subscriber - similar to how PS+ works. If you claim a game on PS+ and quit PS+, you lose those games.

If you buy the game you can keep it and still play it even after you're done subscribing.

You are reacting to a factually incorrect statement. You do not lose access to games you paid for if your Pro subscription is canceled.

Don't forget that they value new ways of spying on users at a non-zero dollar amount, and probably intended to slap ads all over the interface (maybe—maybe—not the games themselves) to make up the difference, or at least were holding that possibility in reserve in case it was needed or they just wanted to kick returns up a notch later (I'd be shocked if it didn't come up in any "decks" used to sell the project internally).

Fair, and that was certainly the YouTube model— years of free video hosting to saturate the market, now preroll and interstitials everywhere with "YouTube Premium" just a click away.

unless all those compute resources are just sitting idle anyway, so why not get something for them, even at a (deep) loss

Because usage degrades hardware?

it's more of a forcing function than anything else.

Stadia was dead before it went live.

By this strategy, which disregard customer confidence completely, considering that Stadia isn't exactly well received, I seriously doubt I will put my money on it getting anywhere.

Stadia runs on the edge, not in their cloud.

Nice try, Bezos.

So much for the usefulness of my GCP Cloud Architect cert...

Glass half full.

Think how good your rates might be for the last six months of 2022!

"That timeline was devised early last year, after an intense monthslong debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Information."

Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.

I think you underestimate how political Google has become internally.

The extent to which Google and Microsoft have switched places from where they were a decade ago is hilarious.

https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000...

Hah, I love that comic. Here's the full one: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

That comic, by the way, is one of Manu Cornet's Goomics (i.e. originally Google-internal comics).

The irony of an AMP link..

Google hasn't replaced Microsoft. It's joined it.

I picture search engine team laughing secretly (or openly?) looking at this post? Is that an accurate imagination?

I don't work at google so I have no idea of knowing what it's like.

Why? They're the people (including ads) that keep the company afloat. GCP is just another sideshow, albeit a large one.

For one thing, there is a lot of resentment about their lower quality bar. I am not a googler and never have been, but GCP has hired a lot of people I wouldn't hire even on a dare.

Ironic, because GCP's user experience was great and there's some really cool tech that went into it.

Turns out that setting absurdly high hiring bars doesn't mean much if you don't make products people like, and kill off the ones that people do.

This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.

You can't plant a leak, if it's planted by a 3rd party it's either a lie it's or a leak.

CTOs and CEOs who matter do not give shit about these sort of leaks. Google cloud is unlikely going anywhere because it is the same thing on which Google runs. Unless Google itself is shutting down the marginal cost of providing GCP to the rest of the world is less (still in billions though).

What would one prefer ? Google top brass not setting deadline to beat competition? Google not trying to be market leader ?

It’s not, though. Search and Adsense still run on Borg, not GCP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com