Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

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It’s not Google’s competitor making this story if you look at previous blog and critical comments from last few years you can see, google has internally been struggling on how to get more profit out of Google’s users. Also google PR is launching active campaign to muzzle voice by downvoting critical comments and blogs. Happened yesterday to my comments on HN and might happen to this comment as well.

Google used search for additional revenue by first make advertisement appear as legitimate search results by using a non prominent and small font text “Ad” in front of ads. But these are on top of search result. So asking users and company to pay to be on top of search results.

Launching new service and then offering free to attract developers and users and if it failed to generate revenue shut them down. [1]

As google is faltering on revenue in cloud, they started using security as pretext to scare the users of gsuite [2] and take away the functionality and force them to toe the google line and soon there will be change in charges and conditions.

Also shut down of gcp is a legitimate concern, google doesn’t care about users, they offer free to gain traction and if can not generate revenue shut down the service without regard for users.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21806595

I don't want to comment much on these threads because I am a googler and anything I said will be taken with pile of salt. But about your [2], from the thread it looks like Microsoft is doing the same thing -

> Microsoft’s Office365 will make a similar change in October 2020.

> https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/office/blogs/end-of-su...

So read of that what you can.

And I don't even want to comment on killedbygoogle.com. I don't see many Google Cloud or paid products there. And there was a similar Microsoft site posted here couple of weeks ago.

You can comment freely what you feel right, you work for google doesn’t take away logical arguments and that’s what the debate is about. I am not a Microsoft fanboy, they are no different and so is amazon when it comes to cloud lock-in.

I would have hoped in yester years that instead of Amazon api for cloud, companies would have adopted an open source standard, or just use API from openstack and extend them.

But that didn’t happen now cloud API are new windows kind of platform lock-in of old Microsoft. Personally I use apache-libcloud [1] to make my service as cloud agnostic as possible.

Also try to use a non USA company as backup mostly in Europe given strong privacy laws unlike US firms.

[1] https://libcloud.apache.org/

>Also google PR is launching active campaign to muzzle voice by downvoting critical comments and blogs. Happened yesterday to my comments on HN and might happen to this comment as well.

Source?

>As google is faltering on revenue in cloud

Source? They don't break this out in earnings so I assume you're just reading tea leaves here?

I don‘t believe they don‘t care about users per say. It‘s more the fact that they are blessed and cursed with the single most profitable business model the world has ever seen. Nothing is going to beat the profit margins of their ad business. It‘s very hard to then go to other models where the margins are much slimmer.

I still say cloud is their best bet besides ads. They absolutely do have to diversify. Once regulation hits it‘s gonna be tough. So cloud needs to be profitable when ads aren‘t growing 20% yoy anymore.

I would add:

[3] https://whenwillgooglekillgcp.com/

As of: https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle/status/120709103195657830...

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