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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing about plus, reader and wave: that was the kind of stuff that people who are now in positions to make infrastructure decisions got worked up about. It's the sort of image damage that may have seemed minor and acceptable at the time that can come back with a very large multiplier in the future, especially given the kind of prominence those products once had.

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You're correct! I've never thought about that before but when they killed the RSS reader it really left a bad taste in my mouth. Now that I _do_ have the ability to make decisions at the company now, the bad taste did transfer over.

This was genuinely not a factor when we signed a 1E8 deal with GCP. What was a factor: (non-exhaustive)

* Access to their developers for core services

* Discounts available

* Quality of support

* Access Controls / Audit / Budgeting

* Dev Tools around Infra

* Future Roadmap

Not one of us ever would have chosen the shutdown of Plus/Reader/Wave as a factor. As a startup we hard pivoted in order to succeed. No surprise that members of the population of products have to die for the population itself to survive.

And the group making these decisions are a bunch of Unixheads who were some of the first members on The Old Reader. We made a few hundred million bet that GCP will be around and capable for the next five years (and probably for the five after). I am confident this will play out in our favour. I'd put money down except for the fact that I already did effectively by recommending the deal.

“Confident will play out in your favor” ...

Do you mean you’re confident this choice will be a decisive competitive advantage vs. having gone with AWS or Azure?

Or simply confident they won’t be gone before you have options?

I intended to mean "It will have been the right decision to not weight the loss of Reader/Wave/Plus highly."

What's a 1E8? I couldn't find an explanation on its meaning.

A 100 M $ business.

Thanks, guys. I should have been clearer. It was on that order in committed spend[0]. The business itself is valued in the billions.

0: Maybe I'll say "on the order of a hundred million" next time.

It's 100,000,000 represented in scientific notation. In this context, a $100M company.

1E8 = 1 * 10^8 = 100,000,000 (xEy = x * 10^y).

I agree that this seems to be a narrative that exists only inside the HN bubble. The fact that a multi million dollar business decision is being made not by running numbers and future roadmap but by one guy in the meeting saying "wait! they shuttered Reader, my favorite RSS reader. Oh no, these other guys killed Zune, my favorite music player. Wait a minute, don't tell me these are the same people who killed Firephone. Ok, we're going with Fujitsu cloud guys" and everyone nodding their head in agreement

you're missing the point. Google has a bad habit of shelving services that people use. If it's never happened to anything you use, good for you, but if I was in a position to make a choice like that I'd be very hesitant to go with a company with such a history of shutting down services.

If people can't tell the difference between free consumer products and paid enterprise services (appengine has been running since 2008) then they have bigger problems when it comes to decision making.

Google Maps is a paid enterprise service, and while they didn't discontinue it, they did increase the price by 14x.

Of course, personally I chose AWS over Google Cloud well before that, because Google Cloud's authentication is so complicated and their examples so indecipherable.

This was the Hire by Google sales pitch.

True. But not everyone works at a multi million dollar business. Many start using cloud platforms in small companies and side/school projects and build up knowledge from there which eventually affects bigger companies: "Hey! Should we use the platform most of our people are already familiar with, or the one Bob used for his 500 line hackathon app last weekend?"

I'm not actually worried much about the multi million dollar companies using Google Products because then they start actually caring about you. When I worked at a place that made them significant ad money, I got splendid sub hour support. But Google is among the most disrespectful companies towards smaller actors while still trying to get as much money out of them as possible I have ever interacted with. E.g. Just recently it took us 3 weeks, 5 chat support sessions and 2 interventions from their supposed expert team to get an inappropriate "customer photo" shot 4'000 km away from maps/search removed. Or the whole Youtube ContentID disaster, or getting forced into G+ just for them to close it, etc etc.

Don't think anyone really cares about 1-2 products being closed that they were using, it's just a lot a things that add up and changed the perception of the company quite a bit over the years.

Reputation does matter but depends on circumstances. We are discussing using a certain in-development chip from a giant company with a reputation of completely and utterly failed delivery of a chip in a related area (and lying to public). The first question I've asked - if they failed that thing just recently, how do we prepare for them possibly failing our new project? This is a serious problem to consider.

The thing is that a long term roadmap for a startup is 3 years. So you're going to look for things that are going to get you 3 years down the road cheaply, and then you still aren't that big, you have gigabytes of data, not hundreds of terabytes of data, so pivoting to another cloud provider isn't a big deal. Now, scale up to a company that has a monthly IT spend of 50 million dollars. You aren't moving that much infrastructure between cloud providers on a dime. Past a certain scale, there is a huge incentive to standardize on a vendor that has a 10 year time scale. We know AWS will be there in 10 years. Will GCP be there in 10 years?

I suspect the 50 mil / month guys will choose between AWS/Azure/GCP based on credits + discounts because all these clouds will be around 10 years from now. But it's true that I have no experience at that level (only from 0 to 9 mil / month) and the calculus could be completely different. I don't actually know if they could get greater commitments at that spend but it sounds likely. That's more than half a billion a year. Huge.

Perhaps someone who's made the decision on that can share.

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