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Comment by rlupi | Hacker News Reader

> It would take talent for them to mess up hosting businesses who want to use their TPUs on GCP. > But then again even there, their reputation for abandoning products

What are the chances of abandoning TPU-related projects where the company literally invested billions in infrastructure? Zero.

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Enterprise sales and support takes a lot of people skills, hand holding, showing respect for the current state, being willing to deal with and navigate the internal politics of the customer, etc.

All things that Google is remarkably bad at.

I don't know what scale of "billions" you're talking about; but, Intel blew 1–2 billion on Larrabee. Even worse: Intel blew 5+ billion on mobile pre-iPhone. I remember when that team was shown the door — that's when we had to evaluate the early RGX GPUs as a backstop to try to win Apple's business; the RGX's were turds.

Penny-wise pound-foolish.

Intel also wasted untold billions trying to compete with Qualcomm building cellular chips with lackluster results and the sold the division to Apple which has spent billions more just to end up with the lackluster C1 in the SE.

Bit of an aside but Larrabee didn't fail. Intel inexplicably abandoned the consumer GPU market but the same tech was successfully sold to enterprise customers in the form of Xeon Phi. Several of the largest supercomputing clusters have used them.

https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20...

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