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Comment by SimianSci | Hacker News Reader

I've been burned too many times by Google's need to constantly kill its own products. I strongly caution anyone from tying their business to a Google product until the product has existed for more than a decade. Google's strategic ADHD does not instill confidence when combined with the knowledge that these AI-models are very expensive to run.

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Very true. I bought an Epson Ecotank printer a while ago that had on the box, "Google Cloud Print" and I used it and it was amazing, I could print a photo I just took, to my home printer, from anywhere in the world. Then they killed it, and my useful printer stopped being so useful.

I don't trust Google anymore.

I don't understand this perspective, yet I keep seeing it in these Gemini threads. The Google Graveyard is large, yes, but they've considered themselves an "AI-first company" for several years now. It's clear by now that consumers will expect it to be part of search as well as part of their smartphone experience. That's Google's core business, not some random app or moonshot. Do you really think Google's going to say in a few years, "well, this AI stuff was neat but we're going to sunset it now"?

The question is will they say "well, this model was great but we have better/shinier models now, so we'll sunset it. Please change all your software to use the new thing with a new API interface and different expected results".

This exactly. If you're ever considering using a google product for something important, you would do well to read this classic blog post first.

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

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Dear RECIPIENT,

Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem.

We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year.

Please go fuck yourself,

Google Cloud Platform

I did have some nagging sense that what i was writing was very unoriginal :)

You can always find it again by searching <google cloud fuck you> in your favorite search engine ;)

> Do you really think Google's going to say in a few years, "well, this AI stuff was neat but we're going to sunset it now"?

AI, no; this AI stuff, almost certainly. It's kind of like arguing that Google's never going to give up on chat - sure, chat is important, but that's not exactly helpful to the devs who made use of the XMPP interop in Google Talk to build great apps that then broke when Google killed it.

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