You know Google has a serious credibility problem when half or more of the comments on tech sites covering product launches are questioning when Google will decide to randomly pull the plug.
Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a year.
The real issue is this: Why am I paying 10 dollars/user/month for this when G suite Business is 12? I could see using this for the organization, but not at that cost.
If nobody wants to pay, you at least know that.
Even if you had the source code to the app (which Google isn't about to give out at any price), what you'll find is that it's an app architected to link against libraries nobody has ever seen and run atop a distributed computing fabric that's loosely related to Kubernetes but, really, nobody's ever seen, storing data to a backing store nobody's ever seen, and identifying users via an authentication model that nobody's ever seen.
Dangling references all over the place, leading to special sauce Google is even less likely to publish, because it's deeply tied into a physical hardware architecture that Google can't publish, because even if they did nobody's going to build it.
Some of Google's user-facing stuff runs on the architectures they make public, like GCP. But a lot of it runs on Google's proprietary fabric of service management and distributed storage, which is an alien planet relative to the world outside their walls. Publishing an app out of that part of the ecosystem would be like Google handing a company a koala with no eucalyptus trees. It'd be dead in days.
I don't think this is true. Plenty of "normal", non-HN people bring this up too (I mean, not my mom, but like regular somewhat tech-savvy people). You can point to GCP all you want, but people are just going to keep pointing to https://killedbygoogle.com/.
What you're doing is claiming people hold an easily attackable position that they don't hold, and attacking that position. It's called strawmanning.
I'm going to look at this idea, see what it might be able to do, and look at whether there's another alternative that would be likelier to survive.
“Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud”
And they point blank said that Google is not investing into GCP and implied that it's on a death bed.
LOL
1. Some of the things they launch they probably shouldn't be launching because they have next to no chance of ever being a meaningful business for Google. (eg. Google Helpouts)
2. Some of the things they launch are attempts to get into a particular area and Google's interest in that area lasts longer than their interest in whatever they initially launched. Chat is probably the best example of this; Google Talk, Hangouts, heck, I don't even know what it's called now! In such cases Google should be more disciplined about supporting whatever it is they've launched. Re-brand & iterate as much as they want, but never leave customers hanging.
I think if Google followed these two rules they would be sunsetting a lot less stuff. They might still need to retire the odd product/service, but at least they wouldn't be doing it so much that customers doubt every single launch.
Their current approach hasn't been working well for their customers, but it's actually going to begin affecting their customers less and affect Google more. Who in their right mind would put any medium/long term stock into Tables, for example? Customers no longer affected. Now Google can't launch a service that the market will take seriously.
Not sure when that was released, though!
We are talking about document sizes that Word for Windows 95 could handle.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting-bi...
I'm inclined to agree with you on Docs though, there is a bunch of stuff that Notion does (really badly IMO) that Drive/Docs just can't do, and so people use Notion instead.
For example (in case any Google PMs are reading), folding bullets, easily embedding tables, embedding sub-docs, faster navigation/caching of folders in the web browser, and perhaps most important, a sensible way to build a wiki-type knowledge base, with "front pages" on each directory (like how Github handles README.md).