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Comment by garbthetill | Hacker News Reader

Thats so interesting to me, I always assume companies like google who have "unlimited" dollars will always be happy to eat the cost to keep customers, especially given gcp usage outside googles internal services is way smaller compared to azure and aws. Also interesting to see snapchat had a hacky solution with AppEngine

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These are the best additional bits of information that I can find to share with you if you're curious to read more about Snap and what they did. (They were spending $400m per year on GCP which was famously disclosed in their S-1 when they IPO'd)

0: https://chrpopov.medium.com/scaling-cloud-infrastructure-5c6...

1: https://eng.snap.com/monolith-to-multicloud-microservices-sn...

The "unlimited dollars" come from somewhere after all.

GCP is behind in market share, but has the incredible cheat advantage of just not being Amazon. Most retailers won't touch Amazon services with a ten foot pole, so the choice is GCP or Azure. Azure is way more painful for FOSS stacks, so GCP has its own area with only limited competition.

I’m not sure what you mean by Azure being more painful for FOSS stacks. That is not my experience. Old you elaborate?

However I have seen many people flee from GCP because: Google lacks customer focus, Google is free about killing services, Google seems to not care about external users, people plain don’t trust Google with their code, data or reputation.

Customers would rather choose Azure. GCP has a bad rep, bad documentation, bad support compared to AWS / Azure. & with google cutting off products, their trust is damaged.

GCP as I understand it is the E-commerce/retail choice for this reason. Not Amazon being the main reason.

Honestly as a (very small) shareholder in Amazon, they should spin off AWS as a separate company. The Amazon brand is holding AWS back.

Absolutely! AWS is worth more as a separate company than being hobbled by the rest of Amazon. YouTube is the same.

Big monopolists do not unlock more stock market value, they hoard it and stifle it.

Google does not give even a singular fuck about keeping their customers. They will happily kill products that are actively in use and are low-effort for... convenience? Streamlining? I don't know, but Google loves to do that.

The engineering manager that was leading the project got promoted and now no longer cares about it.

High margin companies are always looking to cut the lower-margin parts of their business regardless of if they're profitable.

The general idea being that you'll losing money due to opportunity cost.

Personally, I think you're better off just not laying people off and having them work the less (but still) profitable stuff. But I'm not in charge.

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