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Comment by res0nat0r | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that folks here think GCP is the same thing as Google Reader. That's absurd.

Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone.

GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly.

https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/google-data-center-nevada/

https://www.rgj.com/story/money/business/2019/02/13/google-i...

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The issue for me isn't Reader itself but what it says about the disconnect between Google management and us, the users of Google products. That seems to have happened around the time Google went from _having_ a "user base" to being effectively ubiquitous. I can't speak for others, but Google of the 2000s "got" the hacker/nerd mindset in a way that was the closest thing to empathy I've ever felt from a corporation. That sounds naive to write down here in almost-2020, but that was how it felt at the time. When Reader died, so did that feeling, and now all of us are running around unsure if the Google products we personally care about are the ones Google management care about. Leaks like this one do not inspire confidence in that.

Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. The markets are entirely different, and ascribing the fate of Google Reader as a sign of anything on the B2B front doesn't make sense.

> Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services.

They may have different revenue models, but there is little difference when it comes down to management killing services which aren't profitable.

If there is a difference, it is that Reader could be maintained at little cost, while GCE (when it gets the axe) could potentially be costing google hundreds of millions per year to keep running.

There have been plenty of other cases where google has burned bridges with the technical crowd which they should have embraced as champions for selling services. Killing off XMPP support was another prime one for me, and absolutely affected paid enterprise customers as well.

Reader could only be maintained at little cost if its dependencies were stable. But stable infra doesn't get you promoted, so every service needs to be staffed indefinitely (to keep it on the upgrade treadmill) or killed gracefully before prod explodes.

These same arguments can be applied to GCEx 100x more. So the point stands.

To be fair, the switch to mobile-first did more to kill XMPP than Google did. It's a lot better now a decade later with all the XEPs, but now there's nobody there to talk to so it's too late.

Just a cursory look at killedbygoogle.com will show you a list of products that fall in the category of not free and used by business (Hired by Google) and/or were products that developers integrated with their own software that was killed.

As a developer or a company, why should I trust Google as a platform?

It's not just Reader and all the other services. It's really crappy customer service too. Reddit's got a good thread going about someone that paid up on GSUITE that got their account locked. You have to hope a tweet goes viral to get help.

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ecacki/gsuite_sus...

This is not an economic problem. It is a trust problem.

That's irrelevant. Its about trust, commitment and sticking it out. Google's penchant of throwing shit against a wall to see what sticks seems to prevent them from applying themselves to increase the stickiness of their shit.

You simply cannot trust Google to do right by me, the user. That's it.

See, the thing is though, that they kill stuff that DOES stick as well. There's plenty of stuff in the Google Graveyard that was still widely used, with large user base, and they kill it anyway. There's no consistent logic to their killing of products. Sometimes they simply don't want to update it, sometimes it's purely internal politics (G+), sometimes there's just no reason we can find.

What people believe about them matters, not whatever internal rationalizations may or may not have occurred.

Aside from their bad reputation for killing products, they also have a bad reputation for providing next to zero human support services for their products - even if you do pay for them.

And yet, the gsuite accounts I pay for can't use Google Home properly.

AWS has launched a hundred small products which anyone can signup for on the spot, it’s not that different than consumer product releases. And it’s also not the opaque enterprise sales process of Oracle and IBM where things move at a way slower pace.

It’s somewhere in between and if Google started launching a bunch of new DB and other infrastructure products I’d be worried about adopting them individually - not worried that the entire data centres and business divisions getting shut down. Because Google will probably move on to another product without thought of the last one.

Feelings often don't make sense, but you can't 'logic' feelings away that easily. Or I can't, anyway.

Agreed that Google isn’t going to announce one day that they’re going to demolish all the datacenters in 30 days, but that doesn’t mean that GCP has any guaranteed future either. If Google leadership decides to walk away from cloud hosting, it’ll come in the form of reallocated engineers, reduced headcount, smaller conferences, and a general transition to “maintenance mode”. (At which point it’s a corporate backwater and everyone who can transfer out will.)

But for companies picking a cloud platform tomorrow, that’s a fate as good as death! AWS and Azure won’t slow down development and new features, so a couple years after GCP stops being a priority, it’ll start also being a bad deal, and a couple years after that it’ll be a straight-up strategic liability. THAT is why anything other than full-throated support from Google leadership for indefinite GCP investment will lose them business.

And maybe they won’t kill it, but I ve had a number of times platform changes killed features I used. Thing is, with a company I pay for I can vote with my wallet. With Google it’s just sending a message and hoping it doesn’t end up in nullspace somewhere.

Google is just too big as a company, and if they replaced every human in it with drones no one would know the difference. There is no human face or point of contact or any accountability and it’s becoming a problem.

My girlfriend was able to get on the phone with a tech support person for her small business ads and I was shocked she was able to even talk to someone at Google over a phone without being a major company with a big monthly bill.

The woman was still snarky to her and unhelpful but still a real human was available.

A lot of this has to do with our own perceptions and trust. Purchasing decisions are never fully rational or information complete.

Ads are the only place afaik where you can get to speak a human. Try Youtube for instance :)

In any case, its a free market, but buying from vendors who I can talk to if something happens, has way more value to me than a ‘free’ product.

> that doesn’t mean that GCP has any guaranteed future either.

Nothing has a guaranteed future.

> AWS and Azure won’t slow down development

As long as it's paying off, they won't, and AWS maybe for longer even if it isn't. But Microsoft is no stranger to making investments in offerings and letting them stagnate or outright killing them if they don't pay off.

And which Enterprise product we are talking here?

Every API they have ever released is eventually placed in WONTFIX. It's not like you have the source code.

While Google Reader might be the most popular of the tools, that got offline'd, doing so is a common pattern with Google. According to gcemetery.co[1] Google has already killed 164 products, with each one having an average lifespan of approx. 4 years.

Just have a look at "API" and also "Services"...

[1] https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/

Google is always building new data centers to handle traffic growth for their own services. GCP infrastructure wouldn't be turned off, but re-purposed for internal growth.

Bingo.

On the other hand the, in comparison tiny, cost that Google Reader and other was in the budget, would have given Google so much good will. It was in other words cheap positive PR.

Killing Reader was massive strategic blunder, which in fairness to Google was probably not obvious to see at the time. But then to repeat that with Maps API,Google+, Sketchup and Wave (perhaps wave was first) just cemented Google's untrustworthy reputation.

Sketchup?? Huh. Glad I didn't get into it, then. This is the first time I've heard that, and I thought I was up to speed with the stuff Google dropped.

SketchUp was acquired from Google by Trimble in 2012 >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SketchUp

> 10+ billion invested

These are big numbers to us, but it's about 1/4 of their quarterly revenue--i.e. they bring in 16 times that number every year.

Don't think they wouldn't sell it to Amazon or Microsoft in a heartbeat if they decided to exit the cloud business.

It doesn't matter, a datacenter can always be repurposed for their own internal product lines.

To be perfectly honest, i would rather go with a company that provides cloud as one of their main products rather than a company that has it as one of their many products.

Google piled massive resources behind Google+ and look where that is.

Personally, I don't think Google will yank the cord on this entirely, but they may just stop piling resources into it and/ or significantly increase prices to ratchet up profits. They don't have to drop the whole cloud to really screw up a developers life, just screwing with one API I rely on can kill a product and they've already done exactly that.

The problem is with Google you just don't know what's going to happen. Microsoft and Amazon are both known and neither plays games with their products.

> Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter..

Money talks. Culture talks louder.

Yeah, GCP is not the same as Google Reader, more like Google Maps. But that one recently had some changes that royally fucked some businesses over by changing pricing and quotas, so maybe not so absurd after all.

Exactly. If they just don't improve their pricing in line with AWS/Azure (which means massive capital investment, always subject to economy shifts in the cost of money) then people will be looking to move.

All the cloud offerings are massively more expensive than owning/leasing unless you have large dynamic scaling requirements. There will be middleware in the future to allow cloud agile / hybrid operation, so maybe cloud compute will become more commodity, as opposed to the current Rolls Royce pricing. At that point will Google be interested? Depends how much marginal cost is involved compared to running data centers just for themselves.

It could be like what they are doing with Google Fiber where it doesn't die suddenly, but it doesn't grow either.

Investments in data centers and infrastructure can mean that the Google Cloud may live on, but different offerings in the cloud might change with little notice.

Surely you realize that GCP is not a single product offering, it's a collection of products.

https://cloud.google.com/products/

If you wanted to make a comparison, you should compare Google Reader to Traffic Director or DialogFlow

Even if they don't just "turn off", why would I want to invest in a cloud platform that only staff enough to keep the lights on, while there are cloud platforms out there that continue to provide new features to make my development process less painful?

Those datacenters don't only house GCP you know. I'd be willing to bet GCP only makes up a comparatively small portion of their datacenter computing resources.

So gcp is costing Google a lot more than Reader, that only bolsters cynicism.

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