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Comment by joshe | Hacker News Reader

A problem for me building on this is that Google Cloud has no coherent strategy. So the price could easily be double or quadruple Amazon in 2 years.

Google Maps is the key lesson here. 10 to 20 times price increase, just because someone had a meeting. No justification or coherent strategy, just "sorry here's a shiv to the gut".

At least with Amazon, as chaotic as it is, you know that they just mark stuff up to the margin they want and let the market sort out what gets used. Google is into secretive grand strategy that changes completely anytime 4 product managers get together in a room.

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Oof, thanks for reminding me about the Google Maps pricing increase.

It was very difficult to understand their thought process, and we were pretty much forced to find alternative services that had a more reasonable pricing structure. The amount they wanted to charge us for a few million geocode requests per month was bananas.

Was there really no value in keeping a customer like us around at a more reasonable rate?

It's surprising how Google have shot themselves in the foot with their short term thinking. Nobody trust them for anything that involves long term support on any new services/products(and several already existing products).

Yegge had an article saying that Google had really good tools to clean up uses of deprecated calls and the like and this had made them way too cavalier about breaking changes. Can't vouch for it but an interesting dynamic.

I mean, a common joke among ICs at Google is that the API or service you're calling is deprecated but the replacement system isn't ready yet. They have good tools, but the cavalierness about breaking changes would be more because teams can just say "not supported" anymore for internal APIs and services, a more thorough test suite, & really principled rollout strategies to catch issues before they get too big.

Perfect example of this is google analytics. The depreciated Universal Analytics on 7/1/2023:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en

But the API to access the replacement GA4 data is still in Beta: (for dotnet / go / python and node):

The gcs change last year was also terrible, such an expensive increase

Yes! Saw that and was relieved I have nothing on them :-)

This! Google has shown many times they can't be trusted.

such a biased comment. do you think AWS is sitting on 2012 prices ?

Not true anymore after AWS’s ipv4 pricing announcement.

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