Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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’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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com