Comment by tzury | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzury | Hacker News Reader

People with real knowledge to the matter knows that GCP is growing, and more companies are adopting GCP every month.

This is an attempt (which according to some of the comments here quite succeed) to create a story where there is no story.

Should Google Cloud aim to be better and bigger? Sure. Should Google / Alphabet execs need to discuss challenges and strategy? Sure.

What and where is the story?

GCP produce new products and features every week [1]

At my company, we use all major 3 clouds. The GCP support is super fast. The GCP price is better than other two.

Google indeed has a learning curve as a company, and that is at the area of selling to the enterprise. By its DNA, Google is an engineering company, and it takes years to understand how to "attack" the market, build teams of sales, marketing, and all the supporting infrastructure, and they do it.

Time will tell how successful they are, but I cannot see any option for them to shut down this great platform known as GCP. It simply make no sense.

There is a trend in the media in the recent months to rant about Google by all means and angles, and I tend to think this article is just one of those.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/

> and more companies are adopting GCP every month

A rising tide lifts all boats. Are more companies adopting GCP because they are leaving Amazon/Azure? Or is it simply because the market is still immature and growing fast?

Who cares if they are leaving Amazon or Azure. All that matters is they use GCP too.

According to the title Google does. If the market matures and Google is not able to win customers from Amazon/Azure then they will not attain that #1 position.

Every company wants to be number 1. They don't stop making money and exit the market just because they aren't.

Google did just that with G+, Hangouts, Checkout and a whole raft of others. Even if you don't become #1 you owe it to your customers to plan ahead and to ensure a business is 'unit cost profitable' at the scale at which you offer it so that you can sustain it.

Going for broke on projects and then canning them when they fail to attract the kind of success that a smaller company would be more than happy with is in the long run a losing bet.

None of those are enterprise products. Consumer businesses given away for free are very different than directly selling infrastructure and services.

Hangouts was a GSuite (enterprise) service. Customers were forced to move Chat & Meet when they shut down Hangouts.

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...

True, but that’s a replacement and upgrade to a new service. Do you consider that the same as a shutdown with no alternative?

I’d say the biggest situation that materially affected companies was the Google Maps pricing change, but most seem to be fine with that now.

From the article:

> The group [which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely

It's sounds like shutting down GCP at some point is definitely a possibility.

Why does "talked about" mean so much but "eventually dismissed" mean nothing? Are you selectively reading this?

Why does “dismissed” mean so much but “eventually” mean nothing? That makes it sounds like it was a pretty serious conversation where most people up to this point may have been using GCP with the idea that shutting it down was never a real option for Google.

They're both meaningful. GCP still exists because they eventually dismissed the idea of shutting it down. But the fact that they discussed the idea means that shutting it down was a real possibility. I think it also means that if GCP's category position weakens out stays the same, they'll consider shutting it down again.

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