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Comment by danols | Hacker News Reader

This argument is getting old for B2B products. Would you mind sharing a list of Google Cloud Products or even just Business to Business related products that have been shut down?

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App Maker, Google Cloud Print, Google Hangouts, Hire by Google, Fabric, Google Station, Google Correlate, Google Translator Toolkit, Google Fusion Tables, G Suite Training, Hangouts on Air, Google Cloud Messaging, Inbox by Google, Google URL Shortener, Google Realtime API, Google Site Search, Google Spaces, Picasa, Google Checkout.

I got bored and stopped before finishing 2012, but you can go back and find more.

App Maker is probably the worse on that killedbygoogle.com copy & paste list. Rest are B2B really?, the product evolved and got re-branded/consolidated or meh, was it really widely used anyway? Not a single one is a Google Cloud product.

I am no Google fanboy and get frustrated by a lot of things they do. But I think the Google kills everything argument for B2B products is getting tiresome. Especially in a Google Cloud Platform context.

Their actions on the Google Maps API absurd price hike and the recent GKE pricing structure change debacle is a whole other story and worth a lot of criticism.

I absolutely consider the rest of the best to be B2B. Some of them are also used by consumers (in the same way that many products are both B2B and B2C), but all of those products have business use cases. Whether it was "widely used anyways" is a different argument and a bit of a shift in the goalposts.

Were any of them paid B2B products that required any effort by the "client" to migrate? Because if its not paid, its not really a B2B product.

Any business tool requires effort to migrate. No matter if paid or not.

I don't think you understood the two different requirements:

Was it a paid business tool? (If not, it's not really a business tool, it's a tool someone was relying on for business, which is different).

Then secondarily, was there a migration cost? Which there sometimes isn't if, for example, two tools are API compatible.

There are literally zero GCP products in that list. (Despite the unfortunate naming, both Cloud Print and Messaging predate GCP and have nothing to do with it.)

GCP has been around for a fraction of the time of Google as a company. It is perfectly valid to have at least some concern here as Google as a company has a long track record of shutting down products. Conversely, it is tenuous at best to use the argument that since GCP has never shutdown a product that they won’t given how many of their products were launched very recently.

Yes, that argument has been made ad nauseam, but the previous poster was asking specifically for GCP products that have been shut down -- and the response doesn't seem to contain any.

Yes, many of the GCP products that were launched in the past six months were not shutdown.

I think you misread-

> a list of Google Cloud Products or even just Business to Business related products

They asked for GCP or B2B products, not only GCP products.

App engine has been around for 10+ years.

I remember the Prediction API was deprecated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200112103521/https://cloud.goo...

It used to be here https://cloud.google.com/prediction/ which now redirects to what I assume is its replacement.

They've done the bait and switch with plenty of B2B products. Eg Google Maps API and GKE.

Has nothing to do with killing B2B products. But I share your frustration and distrust in them for those two changes.

With the Google Maps API price change they demonstrated that they are very capable & willing of abusing their market position with shocking price hikes and with the GKE structural price change that they are no longer interested in the trust & business from small & medium size companies and unless you are enterprise size you can expect unpleasant price changes going forward.

One example, the python2 libraries for google app engine were abandoned, and google forced you to rewrite to totally different libraries for python 3.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/migr...

“Starting with the Python 3 runtime, the App Engine standard environment no longer includes bundled App Engine services such as Memcache and Task Queues. Instead, Google Cloud provides standalone products that are equivalent to most of the bundled services in the Python 2 runtime. For the bundled services that are not available as separate products in Google Cloud, such as image processing, search, and messaging, you can use third-party providers or other workarounds as suggested in this migration guide.

Removing the bundled App Engine services enables the Python 3 runtime to support a fully idiomatic Python development experience. In the Python 3 runtime, you write a standard Python app that is fully portable and can run in any standard Python environment, including App Engine.”

Python2 itself has been sunset, and Python3 the language is not compatible. It doesn't seem outrageous to me to require developers to use a new SDK if they want to migrate their apps to Python3 -- and that's optional too, since Python2 remains supported on GAE.

That's not the issue. I would have expected them to migrate their libraries to python3 (like every other major python library in the world). Instead they wrote entirely new libraries that aren't remotely the same, requiring a more or less rewrite of our app.

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