> The reason people liked it is, imo, because it was a single product with multiple features. GCP OTOH, has been about decoupling (or loosely coupling) the product suite, and users are supposed to pick and choose from a giant array of half-products.

"There are two ways to make money, bundling and unbundling." - Jim Barksdale

The quote is mostly provided in jest, but at the same time there are many customers who want something totally bundled that solves 90% of their problems in 20 minutes but literally can't solve the last 10%, and there are other customers that want generic building blocks that can solve 100% of their problems, even if it takes years to do.

I think it makes sense that Google offers customers both.

> But even Firebase isn't strong enough to resist the gravitational pull of the GCP behemoth.

Part of the reason we got acquired is because of the above: we knew that we had a number of limitations (e.g. infra scalability) that could be solved, and we knew that GCP had DX problems offering a bundled mobile offering (App Engine wasn't "mobile" focused).

And that acquisition really paid dividends: we were able to build a _ton_ of "bundled" services for Firebase by 2016, and continue deeper integrations with GCP (Storage, Functions, Firestore, Auth, etc.). There are definitely UX differences (some of them intentional, due to different audiences), some not (e.g. it seems like not having an integrated log viewer is a DX miss, though my assumption is that staffing on the Firebase side is down so the decision was made to just send folks to the GCP console :/).