> They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.

No, they're an ad company that funds a small moonshot R&D incubator to ethicalwash them. If the moonshots work that's nice, but it's not the purpose.

netflix is tv/film licensing. [0]

facebook is a people database. meta is more people databases. [1]

contracting companies sell additional employee time to other companies.

welcome to the epiphany that many tech companies aren’t primarily software focussed. i was lucky to have a lecturer at university point this out to us fairly early on.

[0]: they started doing production — but that was just to be able to license more tv/films ;)

[1]: phrasing it like that puts a truly horrifying spin on their ad/data brokerage stuff i’ve just realised

Google and Meta are both Advertising companies.

If we want to decrease a tiny bit the insane imbalance in societies we need to have a strong discussion about taxing advertising.

Today? Not 23 years ago (approx) when they started scanning emails?

Mostly coz of everything else about GCP

Google's lack of customer service isn't new or limited to GCP. They also don't provide any human help if you're an advertiser with them unless you spend a crazy amount of money. Twenty years ago I used to spend upwards of $20-30k a month with them and I couldn't get a single reply to any inquiry I ever sent.

If you spend $XXX million / year with them on GCP they will, however, assign a person to be your main point of contact.

Personally, I don't use GCP because of their history of getting bored with their products and abandoning them.

It's nice, maybe I would use it for a personal project, but I go out of my way to discourage my engineering teams from using it.

Google support is abysmal for all of their profitable businesses too, like Ads and YouTube.

It helps if you have a monopoly on app distribution for half of all phones, or video streaming.

Then you can afford zero support and still take 15-30%.

Is that reason customer service? My only experiences with AWS along those lines have not been great...

To this day I still try to use Google as little as possible all because they killed Google Reader

I recently moved over to codex after I couldn’t reup my membership and maintain access to clause code. I will say thus far I’ve found codex to work better and with less limits.

We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.