Hacker News Reader

After trying to reach out to several of their key people on LinkedIn, I tried to reach out to them via a form on their site. This was to GIVE THEM SOME BUSINESS. Never heard anything back. This was for Telco related product that we have so not sure if it is just the Telco people in GCP who are this bad or the rot is wider than that.

Google Workspace acquisitions are already a huge pain for regular orgs. I imagine it takes even longer for such orgs to be assimilated into Google.com, especially since they might decide to utilize dev time to make changes that’ll ease the migration or otherwise enable more data to be directly assimilated.

When we were having a short in-person google cloud training session, we used Qwicklabs. From my understanding, we were trained by a Google contractor. I don't remember if the trainer described themselves as being from Qwiklab or Google.

In the same session, we were also introduced to AWS, and for that training we were trained by someone on the GovCloud team. The target for the training was in the field of proteomics and bioinformatics with machine learning. As a University there were on campus clusters we could use, but this was for using with smaller projects. Most people I knew ended up preferring AWS and sagemaker.

It was an open secret, and discussed off the record, that AWS will always give you better customer service than GCP, regardless of being a University scale client.

I don't think the team is going rogue, it's just another weird way in which Google refuses to provide direct customer support.

> Strange that they haven't fully assimilated their stack / org into Google / GCP proper.

This is the opposite of strange.

Google must comply with all sorts of regulations and compliance.

You get a lot out of the box if you used standard tooling. For example, privacy, GDPR and data retention compliance if you used standardized libraries. You also have dedicated teams who can streamline issues. It's the equivalent of registering your company in Delaware.

...no it's not?

The acquired company may have (probably was) already compliant, or it ended up being better to allow them to continue to operate independently.

The only surprising thing here is that you think all Google acquisitions are shaped the same.

Startups tautological focus on product and do the bare minimum on compliance that they can get away with.

Yes, and in order to operate as a b2b SaaS, the "bare minimum" is relatively high, meaning when acquired the value of integration may not be very much.

The owners may have also just demanded to remain independent as part of the acquisition. Or the wind blew a little from the left on a Tuesday in July; there are a million reasons why Qwiklabs might not have fully rebranded or re-integrated such as you would like them to.

It means nothing.

Independent of company, acquisitions often have a long arduous 'integration' that never completes

I agree in the general case for more complex apps. Firebase for example.

In this case, it seems the content is the real value rather than the app itself. Meaning, the app doesn't have too many roots that can't be uplifted. The main pieces I see are:

  - registering as 1st party app ( a couple months with redtape )
  - used a standard database ( shouldn't use more than a year )
  - used standard auth ( should take less than a year )
  - getting an approved domain name and real estate ( technically it's not a big of a change. it could be political, which brings me back to my original commentary)

In the worst case, it would take 2-3 years even at Google pace to rewrite the app. It's been 7 years.

2-3 years of not focusing on core product. Google has made this mistake a ton. It’s also learned with Nest using non google hosting for a longgg time.

The app gains nothing by being in google proper. So just don’t do it. Focus on what matters most not on being technically correct.

> The app gains nothing by being in google proper.

Or Google gets sued and pays fines that exceed the value of the company. As evidenced in this thread, Google is increasingly losing goodwill and trust from tech people. This product that has good content but seemingly haphazardly rolled out isn't helping.

Maybe the solution is for Google to stop acquiring companies unless they have a streamlined pathway to integration and an environment which those companies thrive.

On the other hand they could take that 2–3 years of work and spend it doing anything else. I doubt someone’s highly incentivized professionally from migrating this over.