> Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company
That, also it feels like it replicates the college environments like MIT, where projects get funded by the university, large enterprises or the state (especially defense), so when a project gets 'deprecated' its generally due to the project funders wanting it. Since these are the end users, there is absolutely no problem in it - the end user wants it deprecated anyway. As far as I know, Google was born literally from such a state-funded project in MIT. This likely makes Google environment somewhat like a postdoc extension of that environment.
But this attitude is totally destructive when facing end users: Small businesses, individuals, artists, freelancers, NGOs, municipialities - practically ENTIRE rest of the world do not have the large funding and time that Google has inside and outside Google.
They can't risk their businesses getting broken every other year, less every 6 months, because some people at Google thing that v2 is something is 'better' even if its incompatible with v1 of the earlier product, breaking everyone's sites, apps, whatever and expecting them to spend the money and time they don't have to jump through those upgrade hooks.
Worst, are 'deprecations'. They are literal 'f*k you's to end users. Even if some service is deprecated with 3 months' of warning, the small business or individual won't have the time or energy to salvage everything and move it to somewhere else. It will cost a lot to them, and it will affect their income and livelihoods.
So people just avoid Google. Build on or use the most reliable organization that does not literally sh*t on their users whenever they feel like it.
> I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste.
Good example. How complicated analytics have become shows just how little Google understands its users and how little it is able to accommodate them. Yes, there is 'great engineering' behind a lot of the stuff, but the complexit, ugprade hoops, backwards-incompatible updates and outright deprecations literally kill any benefit.
In the case of analytics, all that complication is not really worth wasting time (and therefore money) for upgrading. The products came to a point of looking like phd thesis projects more than anything intended for the end users - you have to spend considerable time even as a technical person to learn the system to be able to even use it at an entry level.
I also have analytics on all my sites. I will probably replace it with something else when the upgrade time comes. No way in hell I want to go through another upgrade hoop in 2-3 years and spend all that precious effort and time for doing that.