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Comment by profmonocle | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to get excited about any Google Cloud product launch, because Google almost seems committed to being difficult for businesses to trust. Just today on HN there were multiple stories about Google banning entire companies for arbitrary reasons, possibly as a result of poorly-conceived automated decision-making. And Google Cloud is gaining a reputation for massive price hikes - sometimes doubling rates or introducing charges for services that were previously included.

Some of their services are pretty slick, and it's tempting to build off them, but I don't recommend relying on Google without a backup strategy in case they suddenly pull the rug out from under you.

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This.

Lost access to my business on Google infra / services after leaving a positive review on a bakery while on holiday to Paris - for "violating Google Maps policy".

That should teach tech stuff never to leave reviews and comments, too much risk involved.

This reminds me of how people self censure their real opinions in authoritarian regimes. It creates a climate against creativity and innovation, bringing the system down in the long term.

Under what circumstances would you be violating Google Maps policy while travelling and how does it lead you to lose your enture business on Google services. Something doesn't smell right

google's policy is to ban everything associated with an account immediately upon violation of obscure policy in one specific product.

i do not know what policy specifically could lead to a ban due to a use of map reviews while traveling internationally but at this point this is what many of us have come to expect from google as a matter of course.

algorithm: OMG, this user has searched for 3 different towns in the same session each of which is the site of a nuclear plant! Potential terrorist match!

There is a well documented story of someone loosing his whole firms Google account because a decade before he was privately associated with a developer who years later decided to write scam software. This does not shock me, at all.

But it's really your own fault for not having high reaching contacts into Google's upper tier!

... high-level contacts into Google's upper tier sometimes can't even help.

Yeah, the general consensus I get from reading HN* is that the winds are blowing away from Google services and associated vendor lock-in / account banishment risk, rather than towards.

Given some recent discussions, I found this excerpt amusing:

"... supercharge their websites and mobile apps with Google-quality search. Built on Google’s technologies that understand user intent and context, the solution helps businesses improve the search and overall shopping experience across all of their digital touchpoints."

*My choice of posts to read may be (strongly) biased towards those moving away from Google.

The take away should really be that posts that get voted to the top of HN do not represent the general public, or even the majority of the tech world. Google Cloud makes $20 billion a year in revenue, about a third of AWS. Google overall makes $260 billion. Its revenues are rising by 50%+ annually.

People aren't quitting in droves, and the company isn't on the edge of failure, as regular readers might believe.

I’m not convinced anyone is saying people are leaving in droves… but for infrastructure where trust is key, when it comes to new customers, especially smaller ones? I think some are keeping it in mind.

Google is doing fine, and probably will for years. HN is just saying that the safe option is not to build a business (or a lifestyle) on the shaky foundations that they provide.

Google's business is Google's success, not your success.

I don't think that's a good conclusion. Most of Google's business is search and ad sense. HN consensus is that Google is doing fine. The HN consensus -- which I think is correct -- is not to rely on Google for any critical functionality which might put your business (or personal life) at risk.

- Adsense as an advertising option makes complete sense. Adsense as your sole source of customer growth is asking for trouble.

- Stay the !@#$% away from Google Workspace, if you're counting on business continuity. It's fine for low-stakes use (e.g. students in a school, where there is no long-term continuity).

- GCE is fine as an option if you have a generic dev-ops infrastructure where you just need cloud servers, and where you can move to AWS or Azure in a blink. Relying on Google Cloud proprietary services is asking for trouble.

- Android App Store is fine for a quick buck, or as a supplement to a core business. Think long and hard before building a business around it, though.

... and so on.

I question what is going wrong with Google at a management level. It's products have been undergoing a slow creeping rot since Brin and Page bailed from the company.

Google Search as a product is declining in usefulness due to a very silly decision to no longer support lexical queries(!) They've built a broken AI fad that delivers nothing but song lyrics and shopping results to long tail queries. The core product is rotting and no one is empowered to fix it.

Google Maps is now suffering from the same treatment

Really sad, I used to love Google maps. It feels like it's becoming worse by the year (at least in Europe). It used to be extremely accurate in predicting traffic and knowing about road closures. Now I can often estimate traffic better from memory and have to look up other sources to know about road closures or construction. Business info is pretty good still, but also only because it's provided by businesses.

I cannot understand how they actively got so much worse over a few years. Especially since they don't suffer the Spam/SEO issues they have in Search.

> Just today on HN there were multiple stories about Google banning entire companies for arbitrary reasons, possibly as a result of poorly-conceived automated decision-making.

There might also be some selection bias here since "escalating Google issues to HN" has become a thing. Complaining about Google is popular on HN, for good or bad. Yet, they grow revenue, so they aren't losing customers in droves. It's quite possible customers of other companies just don't escalate to HN (yet).

(Said as a former Google employee.)

It's not just on HN. Also, since HN is not used by the general public, isn't it possible that the number of people facing these issues might be higher?

To be fair Google losing users is not the same as Google losing customers. Their main customers are the companies paying Google to stalk you across the net, and they don't need you to have a Google account to do that.

Yet, they grow revenue, so they aren't losing customers in droves.

They grow revenue, so they aren't losing customers in droves, yet.

Google is a psychopath business partner. It is important to understand this if you are to benefit from a relationship with them. They seem perfectly normal and useful, and then one day will "snap" and destroy your business, banning you for no seeming reason.

This seems a useful service. Yes, use it for your business benefit, but just understand that the psychopath may turn any time, and plan your business contingencies accordingly.

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