shooker435

It used to be called Vertex AI Search for Commerce (leave it to Google to rename a product every year...) It's clunky, but it's usually the winner in every AB test I've seen when measuring for revenue per visitor on large catalog ecommerce sites.

That being said, the most accurate/honest depiction I've seen is a 2-part series on PBS. I think it does a great job of capturing the genius alongside the troubled hubris.

This is a really generous interpretation of what happened... He ran off to Europe with one of their neighbors, and his ex-wife (not divorced yet, though!) was left high and dry with no money and was forced to turn the studio into apartments for income.

Is this class action lawsuit territory? How can they just sweep it under the rug like this?

At a high level, Google does not have a product culture, so there is a lot of white space for companies like ours to make adopting Google Cloud APIs much easier for less technical users.

It's also wild how much Agentic AI is creeping into all of our conversations - this space is constantly evolving as we're building.

It's literally down right now on Cyber Monday...

it's up now (the incident, not the outage)

This means that teams must make an up-front architectural decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner, and developers must stay disciplined to keep components portable from day one, but you can get a lot of mileage out of free credits without burning dollars on any infrastructure. The biggest challenge becomes finding the time to perform these migrations among other competing priorities, such as new feature development, especially if you're growing fast.

Our startup is mostly built on Google Cloud, but I don't think our sales rep is very happy with how little we spend or that we're unwilling to "commit" to spending. The ability to move off of the cloud, or even just to another cloud, provides a lot of leverage in the negotiating seat.

Cloud vendors can also lead to an easier risk/SLA conversation for downstream customers. Depending on your business, enterprise users like to see SLAs and data privacy laws respected around the globe, and cloud providers make it easy to say "not my problem" if things are structured correctly.

I've noticed they market 'overemployment' as a benefit, is this platform similar?

Which honestly may be the future if LLMs stay in a dev's toolkit. Plugging in an AI model to a monorepo provides so much context that can't be easily communicated across microservices in separate repos.

If you need to keep the lights or maintain an SLA and can do so by separating a concern, it can really reduce risk and increase speed when deploying new features on "less important" components.

I've run into this exact thing. Luckily rebuilding a container doesn't cause downtime for us and 99% of our changes require rebuilding an image, so I've just left it as is...

It is annoying though when we make a small infra change and have to wait for the container image to build...

I also believe resource constraints create innovation, which these companies are particularly poised to do.

My theory is a niche consulting firm can perform services to make enough money to build out a product, and better yet, they're being paid to learn about user requirements along the way.

I'm on a similar journey right now, and it's always difficult balancing the dopamine and temptation of a short-term cash injection at the expense of development time spent on the core product we're scaling.