The IBM-ification of Google?
zeroshot.bearblog.dev
zeroshot.bearblog.dev
If you've been around a while you know that at any business critical scale at all you establish a relationship with your cloud provider and get an account manager. When you do this, you have a number to call.
A billion dollar startup not doing this is a keen lesson for the CTO.
Yes, Google likely screwed up here, but being unprepared for account problems, having no established relationship with your provider is a critical mistake.
The article goes on to talk about Hetzner as an example: their pricing is great for individuals but they literally don't even offer account management relationships - even at scale they actively refuse them. There are equivalent stories of account terminations with Hetzner, which is also a key point: this isn't just a big business problem, at all.
I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation, one day we woke up and we simply did not have control of our website for a full week. There was nothing wrong with our payment method, there was no reason the payment shouldn’t have happened, it was completely their fault. They found out because we called them in a panic. This was a major company. We left them a week later and our CEO talks about it constantly as a horror story to other companies and there is no way our situation was unique.
It’s not just about the value of the contract. This whole situation has been in the news for days now. It’s terrible PR and I guarantee you it is costing them business in the long run. All I have seen for days is people talking about how poor Google’s support is, and I’m not even somebody who makes those decisions.
I get it, “Google is too big to fail.” But eventually, that stops being true
In this case, I'd expect major accounts (and maybe Railway isn't above this level?) to be in a protected tier that is immune from automated suspensions like this.
If suspicious traffic occurs that _would_ trigger a suspension like that, the account team would be paged. Because this may mean your important account was compromised, shipped a bug, has been hit by something and you should immediately start working _with_ them to figure it out.
Fairly basic for a company with any customer management motion at all.
But clearly GCP _doesn't_ have a strong customer motion or this story wouldn't have happened.
With an account manager, you call this person up immediately, and they hound the devs in person or call up the devs personally.
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle. -Bryan Cantrill
A few years back someone at work stuck their hand in the lawnmower. I've seen this happen a few times, but that time it ended with Oracle fining us for every VirtualBox install and the company sent The IT Spanish Inquisition around to make sure we all deleted it off our computers. Fun times.
they will even come to your customer call or connect with their rep already working with the mutual customer and so on.
AWS has the best tech and but not as good as Microsoft service wise, they certainly improved a lot last few years and it shows but because they don’t have any enterprise apps like MS their footprint is more limited.
Google keeps talking about GCP being important but doesn’t feel anything has changed on ground
AWS, we could speak directly to Sr engineers on the relevant team. Full transparency, highly responsive. They were clearly trying to understand our issues and suggest change for both us and themselves.
Google was mostly useless. There was one team I got to talk directly to, who were great. But that was the exception.
Practically speaking keeping an eye on locks and transactions is a good idea, as is watching out for your statistics on key core columns going bad when they shouldn't. (analyze and vacuum sometimes don't actually do anything when you need them to...)
Google does and always has treated support as a cost center, rather than a feature or profit center.
This worked for them in the early days and for specific products like Search -- design it well enough and you don't need support*.
Unfortunately, this fails for most other products (and especially all enterprise products) because the magnitude of impacts to a single customer (business instead of user) are so much greater.
F.ex. every conversation I was on with a GCP product team had a weird "Oh, you don't know how anyone who pays for GCP uses it, because you get it for free internally?" flavor.
* Leaving aside the "there's an entire SEO industry to 'support' Search" thing
Railway had dedicated reps and everything. Even the number of the head. One of their railway company leads said so on X or their Discord during the outage.
They paid for everything you can pay for to get Google on the horn and ready because they are not a tiny company. Yet it was still terrible.
The right takeaway is you should not use Google Cloud because Google itself doesn't use Google Cloud for anything critical. I don't know how many times I've said this, but it clearly hasn't sunk in. A Googler once responded, "Well ackshually, Google Domains is built on Google Cloud." Google Domains isn't mission critical and has since been sold to Squarespace.
Google did not "likely" screw up.
To be sure, however, this is a keen lesson for every CTO.
in my experience hetzner does have that. my VP of infra had regular contact with them, was quite important actually because we had scaling needs they couldn't deliver on and we had timelines. hetzner still has issues getting enough intel servers on it seems
they know how to support businesses - small or large. better support if you're enterprise.
hell M$ can even have people at your place in an instant - not the "forward-deployed engineer" propaganda being spread around by SV these days.
Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.
I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it.
So, yes, I do complain.
It's interesting to imagine if there's some kind of middle ground where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent? I suspect at least some of people's frustration is that X or Y was pitched as something serious, which then grates some when it gets canceled.
But maybe you can't launch a product without pretending it's going to be real because it'll be dead on arrival?
Yeah, it's what Google used to do by releasing everything as "Beta". Gmail was in Beta for 5 years with millions of users.
It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.
If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.
I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.
IBM made some decent (sometimes extremely good, even!) products in a lot of segments for a long time after losing their relevance as "driving the future of computing." But rarely as a segment-definer or introducer.
But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating.
I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then.
They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.
I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.
It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations).
Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue.
Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.
Maybe if Google had those support engineers on Google+ for 5 years generating $X, that would've created enough trust that Gemini could now generate $4X.
Not true in the slightest. Google has had some quality hardware products where they killed the cloud service and rendered them useless. Products that were stable and working, but Google decided to pull the plug and make the hardware worthless.
Quality of the product means nothing. You’re at the mercy of the whims of Google’s decision making. The thing you like may stop working in a couple months.
And it also seems if it's not a $100 m+ business they lose interest very quickly. So even good things that could run somewhat cheap of optimized end up with no long term place in the Google ecosystem when they fail to make it big.
... That all said Google kills perfectly good things because they have a few internal rules that encourage it: that there can only be one of a system (dunno if that's applies to product but they seem to always want to consolidate every few years) and that stuff cannot be unowned so reorgs => kill products that don't match the new org structure. That and they incentivize pumping out new products with their promotion process - whether or not they really needed yet another chat/vc/etc product, someone probably figured they could climb the career ladder by shipping another one.
Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community.
No one cares when they kill something niche.
I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic.
And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.
Exactly. I mean, you can argue forever about the stuff that got killed. But you know what didn't get killed? All the stuff they're turning into $4.6T of market cap.
In particular, they didn't kill AI. They're the only pre-AI tech giant with a successful frontier LLM, everyone else failed (Meta) or missed the boat (Apple, Microsoft[1]). They're the only tech giant[2] to produce working in-house datacenter AI hardware.
Making a lot of bets means that you make a lot of bad bets too. But Google has made a lot of good bets.
[1] Though MS got near-exclusive access to OpenAI via a very expensive late investment, which sorta counts.
[2] NVIDIA is giant now, they certainly weren't when these bets were being placed.
They killed their chat app. Then had their pants on fire after Discord became the thing. The same can happen with any app they killed. So no, that's not 'taking risks'. Taking risks is shutting down perfectly working apps that can suddenly become 'the new thing'.
Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success.
Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions.
CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.
Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Google.
Seems apropos.
I think comparing them to IBM is reasonable, just maybe not... today's IBM.
IBM was an absolute hardware and software behemoth leading up to the PC / early Internet era, after which they pivoted from making groundbreaking real things to providing "enterprise support."
They also outlasted almost all of their contemporaries with that pivot, for better or worse.
It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline.
How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives.
I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.
There is a reason for the term "Hetznered" existing. Hetzner can suddenly and permanently terminates your account. They do this without warning or explanation. When it happens, you lose access to all your servers and your backups.
If you search HN, you will find plenty of examples. People lose everything within 24 hours and have no recourse.
Hetzner is amazing for pricing. But the only safe way to use them is if your infrastructure is cloud agnostic. If you are not locked in and can move between providers quickly, it is a very cost effective place to run stateless services like DNS.
I was at an MIT event 8 years ago where Eric Schmidt was booed. It was his first summer at MIT. Basically everything he said about Google and his world view left the students feeling horrified. It was so bad people walked out in a daze.
So if this is the bar, we passed it long ago.
They have everything going for them - amazing technology and technologists, huge distribution and lock-in, and a giant compute advantage and the can pay for more out of cash flow rather than debt or equity. And yet it's still hard to see them not fumbling the ball.
IBM also made its money off of fat enterprise contracts and vertically integrated products. Google makes its money off of being the monopoly owning most of the advertising industry, which ridiculously is still a thing despite advertising not really working.
SV people love to throw out this line, while several of the FOSS packages they use daily in the Linux ecosystem, including the kernel, are sponsored with IBM money, either directly or via Red-Hat.
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
I agree with many points in the article, but there is no informative aspect to the post.
In english lit as a high-school student, I always thought I did reasonably well on my assignments, but consistently got C's. It was very infuriating.
The Opus 4.7 output was remarkably similar to the content in this blog.
Sentence. Short sentence. Noun. Noun. Noun. Sentence to reflect. Wrap it up in a bow.
Sequences of short incomplete sentences, particularly in threes is such a tell
Wang, Bull, Unisys, IBM, DEC, the Mongolian Empire, the Hungarian Empire, Dutch Empire, the Portugese Empire.... they all exist in some form, but are shadows of their former selves.
IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks.
Over time, the company became synonymous with failure and mediocrity.
Out of the four companies listed, Google is the one whose survival I’d bet on.
IBM didn't die :-/
I don't like that they throw AI overview on your face when you search, rather they should show AI overview on the right column and search results on the left.
I disagree with the Apple comparison. Apple haven't done anything successfully innovative for what seems like decades. I do admire their stance on AI though. Not going all in makes them unique.
The one point I will make though is: these people complaining about Google shutting things down is really just funny. It's like complaining about people having abandoned side projects. A healthy organization tries things. Not everything works out or is cashflow positive. That's life.
For reference Google has more employees than all Y Combinator companies combined. Keep in mind there are thousands of dead Y Combinator companies.
A better complaint about Google would be the lack of polish on many products. Take Gmail. Google made haste in adding the "AI Inbox", and yet you can't even read threaded emails in reverse chronological order. People have been complaining about this for nearly its entire existence. With the talent, and now AI - there's no reason such a thing couldn't be fixed tomorrow. It's just CSS and there are tons of chrome extensions that implement this. C'mon...
That sort of stagnation, though, and lack of their "trying things" really moving the needle compared to their decades-old ads product, makes me think they really are becoming the new IBM. IBM, in my estimation, has largely been irrelevant to the future of computing since the early 80s when MS ended up owning the PC story, but they have still had some quite solid stock prices runs at times over the decades (10x in five years at the end of the 90s, say). You can make a lot of money with a no-longer-that-interesting business.
It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.
Kinda the point of preventing monopolies. They stagnate actual growth in the pursuit of profits. Americans don't benefit when Google is a trillion dollar company, but Americans would benefit if there was an actual competitive market.
I don't know anything about Quantum so I'll defer to you on that one.
In the LLMs/inference/ML space they seem to be great at theory and poor at execution until someone else shows them what the model looks like first. Similar to with cloud. Or with mobile. Or with voice assistants. Or with social (well, they never got there on that one even with the copy attempt.) Which is a classic "decline phase" behavior (see also Xerox, Bell).
If all Google products outside of their research papers and labs had disappeared ten years ago, what product categories would be missing?
But it's also over 20 years old.
I would be willing to allow that there are probably some highly vocal people conditioned by OWA trauma who might have demanded this, but by no means a grassroots army.
Can't you even consider the possibility that the reader shutdown and the death of RSS might be causally related?
Google may not be wrong. Who knows. Easy to blame the larger company.
One thing that I really really hate Youtube for is that they don't allow users to turn off their shorts. You can choose to "reduce" Shorts for a given session, but they come back right next time.
That said, Youtube is tremendously valuable for its high-quality content. It's kinda like a restaurant. The service can be horrible. They decor can be hideous. But! I'm going back as long as the food is delicious.
This while paying them for premium for 20 years.
It's free for now but the developer has plans for some kind of subscription for premium features.
https://apps.apple.com/in/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
Go to settings > time management > shorts feed limit. Turn that setting on, and you can select how many minutes you limit to. There's now an option for "0 minutes".
I never once did playables and each time asking them to dismiss them. I wrote down every time I was re-prompted for over a year:
March 19, 2025 - 8:31 PM
April 9 - 4:09 PM
April 24 - 8 AM
May 9 - 5:33 PM
May 20 - 2:07 PM
June 8 - 5:10 PM
July 9 - 6:59 PM
August 9 - 5:14 PM
September 8 - 8:45 PM
November 9 - 8:47 PM
December 9 - 8:48 PM
Jan 8, 2026 - 9:28 PM
Feb 7 — 11:11 PM
March 10 - 9:18 PM
April 10 - 1:10 AM
May 10 - 7:53 AM
I can see why youtube don't want you to disable; because shorts are "addictive" in a certain moorish way and letting you disable would lesson your expected youtube use time.
But it's such a wierd choice on a certain level right. Like "lets make our product objectively worse for users because (in the short term?) we'll make more money". It's the sort of choice that does't really exist in the "real" "normal" economy. Like you bake some bread, you wanna make it as good as possible, I buy it from you because you make good bread.
So anyway I get why they do it. I'm just a little surprised that in their calculations the gains to engagement from forcing shorts are worth the loss of user goodwill. And even like employee morale right. Like how would you feel about your job if you're having to do this stuff, deliberately and explicitly curtailing the choices of your users.
But yes I agree the content is great.
It's despiriting when even anti enshittification blog posts bear all the style of AI created slop.
I don't see slop on youtube and nobody I know is complaining about it. My current problem is private equity buying all the channels I love!
Veritasium, Fern!