7 ms·

What is humorous to me is that Google is hurting users who typically have the most influence over SaaS integrations at their company (managers) by taking away a

by n42 7y ago

What is humorous to me is that Google is hurting users who typically have the most influence over SaaS integrations at their company (managers) by taking away a tool that helped them deal with the part of their job most of them hate the most (hiring/recruiting). If it hasn't been obvious yet to managers watching this, Google's software is not a safe investment for you to make for your company. It is only a matter of time until you will suddenly have to divert your time to figuring out how to migrate away from a Good Tool to a Less Good Tool because Google built it well then took it away. Swapping a tool like this is an abysmal resource sink for you and your company. This is not the first, second, third, fourth or even fifth time this has happened, but this one should hit close to home. Google's software is not a safe investment for you to make for your company.

kayoone 7y ago
Well to that extent, most other SaaS products which are affordable for SMBs are not a safe investment either, it's not that non-google companies/startup never shut down. Actually most SaaS startups fail.
- n42 7y ago
  I agree but I think it's a false dichotomy. At least with a startup you can count on them to, well, try.
  - kayoone 7y ago
    but most lack the financial stability of google and could disappear rather quickly because of that.
    - eitland 7y ago
      Look for companies like Basecamp, companies that arent looking to be aquired or get unicorn status but to stay soundly profitable year-after-year. This was one of the reasons I loved WhatsApp so much early on when that seemed to be the way it was going: a healthy >1B USD company with no dependency except on users. As the WhatsApp story and many other tells us this isn't always safe, but it should be a safer bet than anyone clearly going the "unicorn or nothing" way from the start.
      - smcl 7y ago
        Was WhatsApp healthy or profitable before it was bought by Facebook? I'm not sure if there's any way we can know for sure, but it all played out like a pretty standard Silicon Valley "unicorn" - couple of rounds of investment by a big VC followed by a mega-acquisition by a FAANG.
        danielscrubs 7y ago
        Do we even know they are profitable now without Facebook selling user data? But WhatsApp is an insane success story on its own. Back then, around 20 engineers handling billions of messages per day, with their own servers and spending zero dollars in advertisement and using a non-standard language (Erlang).
        eitland 7y ago
        They had 400 million monthly active users in December 2013. At the same time they had 50 employees I think as well as modest server expenses. They had signalled quite early that they where going to charge money, they had started charging money from at least a subset of users and they were still growing like crazy, 200 million monthly active users since april that year it seems based on the statistics I found. To me that sounds profitable.
    - kyshoc 7y ago
      Financial stability doesn't mean much to the end-user if the product ends up getting killed off regardless.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Profits that don't register for Google can make a sensible business for a smaller company.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Do you think Bebop would have survived if Google never tried to buy it? Or if Google poached the key staff but didn't buy the company?
- croon 7y ago
  > While Hire has been successful, we’re focusing our resources on other products in the Google Cloud portfolio This is not a decision any startup would make. So there's at least some difference, in Googles disfavor.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    It literally was a decision a startup made. Bebop was a startup that sold itself.
    - croon 7y ago
      Selling a startup is not even close to the same as shutting down while admitting your product is successful.
- wil421 7y ago
  SaaS Market is pretty mature. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Tableu, and Mulesoft are a few I have personally worked on that are not really in startup mode anymore.
nkingsy 7y ago
Seems like these non billion user products could be sold off rather than killed. The cost to ready the software to live outside google would be worth it for the goodwill alone.
- tempay 7y ago
  Would this actually be practical? From what little I know about google infrastructure everything is dependent on their in house tooling and spinning projects off is a massive amount of work.
  - eitland 7y ago
    I think the point is that Google has been burning goodwill for a decade now. It might not be visible yet, just like the ice cube who has been heated from -100°C to -5°C and still doesn't melt, but at this point it would take very little energy to thaw Googles goodwill reserves. Anything they can do to return to former status as "defender of the Internet" might be worth huge investments for that alone.
    - debatem1 7y ago
      This is a very good analogy for a concept I've tried to formulate succinctly spur-of-the-moment a few times. I especially like that it captures the reversibility of the trend and the energy cost of doing so. Thanks for sharing.
    - robocat 7y ago
      > ice cube who has been heated from -100°C to -5°C and still doesn't melt, but at this point it would take very little energy to thaw Unobviously a poor metaphor. energy to heat 1kg from -100°C to -5°C: 200kJ energy to melt 1kg from -5°C (as ice) to 0°C (as water): 345kJ Water has lots of extremely non-linear behaviours!!!
      - eitland 7y ago
        Thanks! Do you have a better idea? Either another example or a better way to tell it so it becomes true? I guess I could start somewhere closer to 0°K, but that wouldn't mean much I guess?
kkarakk 7y ago
The only time people jump onboard google products is at launch. Being the premier tech company in the world that actually launches things like this brings significant network effects that help boost these products past noise threshold. After that it doesn't matter coz you'll probably move on to the next company(2-3 years) and it won't matter that the google product you adopted failed/was shut down since you'll be in a different tech time/space continuum bubble and will have adopted newer things. This is really a problem of Google just not bothering to invest in things long term. It's a known problem and I don't think Google cares coz none of these products really disrupt the market or bring in the big bucks which is all tech giants care about.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Interesting dynamic, this is the same as offshoring. Make a decision that is beneficial in the short term, get that bonus or promotion out of it, run away before the much greater long term downside catches up with you. But it can only work in an environment that encourages job hopping... which we have. Hey companies, if you want people to make good decisions then you need to invest in retention above all else.
tylerl 7y ago
Bebop was an acqui-hire, not a real product. All they wanted was the CEO. I don't think anyone took the product seriously except for the person who started it, and once she left Google, there was no reason to continue pretending that it was a real thing.
- noahl 7y ago
  The trouble is that if you have to understand or correctly guess internal Google politics like this in order to know which products you can really rely on, then it's effectively not reliable. With that said, I'd feel fine relying on VMs, disks, managed SQL, managed Kubernetes, etc. Maybe I'm too optimistic. And Google is giving exactly the guarantees they promised - 1 year of notice before shutting down a product.
  - Strom 7y ago
    > And Google is giving exactly the guarantees they promised - 1 year of notice before shutting down a product. This is mostly true, but a bit more nuanced than one might think. Let's take the Go 1.9 runtime for App Engine. It was deprecated on June 27, 2019. [1] Existing deployments will keep working for an undetermined time, however new deployments won't be accepted starting October 1, 2019. That's just a 3 month notice! The offered solution is to migrate to Go 1.11 [2], however that's not straightforward either, because the Go 1.11 runtime is using 2nd generation App Engine, which means a bunch of App Engine specific code that you had working before will need to be rewritten. To make things even more spicy there's already a migration path to Go 1.12 which deprecates every single App Engine specific API. [3] Google is basically slowly shutting down the whole 1st generation App Engine. -- [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go/release-notes https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go/release-... [2] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go111/go-differences https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go111/go-di... [3] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go112/go-differences https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go112/go-di...
    - mogar1980 7y ago
      Note: I work on App Engine. Go 1.11 supports all legacy 1st generation APIs. It's in the first section of the doc [2] that you posted although perhaps we can make this even clearer. We maintained support for these APIs precisely to make this migration extremely straightforward for our existing users as we moved to a more modern underlying technology stack and a version of Go supported by the language community. We absolutely want App Engine to be a place you can confidently build a business upon.
z3t4 7y ago
The cost of switching to another platform should also be calculated into the price when you choose platform.
beardedman 7y ago
Yup. Google a search company, any technology that doesn't impact their bottom line, is dispensable (to a lesser/greater degree) to them.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > Yup. Google a search company, any technology that doesn't impact their bottom line, is dispensable (to a lesser/greater degree) to them. Rather: Google is an advertising company, ...
bla3 7y ago
I agree that not becoming dependent on nascent Google projects is a good call for for consumers. But their cloud offering seems to be pretty stable and reliable. It feels almost as if their consumer and cloud arms are different companies.
- ivanvanderbyl 7y ago
  I certainly hope this is true but I hold a healthy degree of skeptism when using one of their cloud products. This is unfortunate, because overall I've found GCP to be quite far ahead of AWS in terms of product design and integrations.
  - yibilabi 7y ago
    can you elaborate more about 'GCP to be quite far ahead of AWS in terms of product design and integrations'?
zelly 7y ago
Everything they do besides _search_ is meant to distract you from the fact that they have an unchallenged monopoly far surpassing Standard Oil in the 1800s.
- ChrisLomont 7y ago
  Standard Oil had ~90% of refined oil in the United States. Google generates ~63% of all searches [1], with Bing ~25%. I'd hardly call that unchallenged or Standard Oil sized. And as eyes move from search ads to places like Facebook or other platforms, they stand to lose more and more as they don't control where people are. Being so dependent on one source of revenue is very dangerous for them. Interesting fact: Rockefeller's worth was 1-2% of US GDP, which in that metric would be $500 billion - $1 trillion now. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-search-engines-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-s...
  - leereeves 7y ago
    > Rockefeller's worth was 1-2% of US GDP, which in that metric would be $500 billion - $1 trillion now. US GDP is around $20 trillion so 2% would be $400 billion. Google is worth twice that with an $800 billion market cap, or 4% of US GDP.
    - charlesdaniels 7y ago
      I was curious and looked up some sources... Here is the source on Google being 4% of US GDP: [0] Rockefeller being worth 1-2% of US GDP is sourced from [1] on his Wikipedia page. Math checks out. More fun facts: Apple is also around 4% [2]. Microsoft is around 5% [3]. Outside of the tech space... Walmart is around 1.5% [4]. Goldman Sachs is around 0.35% [5]. McDonalds is at ~ 0.08% [6]. Boeing is hovering at about 1% [7]. 0 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28google+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28google+market+cap%2... 1 - http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-john-d-rockefeller http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about... 2 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28apple+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28apple+market+cap%29... 3 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28microsoft+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28microsoft+market+ca... 4 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28walmart+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28walmart+market+cap%... 5 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28goldman+sachs+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28goldman+sachs+marke... 6 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28mcdonalds+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28mcdonalds+market+ca... 7 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28boeing+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28boeing+market+cap%2...
hinkley 7y ago
Whether it's actually safe or not, there's a plausible narrative that it is not and won't be. When I'm doing tech selection, things like this will keep me from picking Google every time. Especially if I'm working for a large business. One of the reasons big companies move slower is maturity. You are expected to keep doing something once you put it out there. Otherwise you're seen as a risky partner and avoided. The only other way to go is to make the things you support so simple that people could, if pressed, do their own maintenance if you pull a fade. Abandonware with a prayer of being adopted by internal people.

by n42 7y ago

kayoone 7y ago

Well to that extent, most other SaaS products which are affordable for SMBs are not a safe investment either, it's not that non-google companies/startup never shut down. Actually most SaaS startups fail.

n42 7y ago
I agree but I think it's a false dichotomy. At least with a startup you can count on them to, well, try.
- kayoone 7y ago
  but most lack the financial stability of google and could disappear rather quickly because of that.
  - eitland 7y ago
    Look for companies like Basecamp, companies that arent looking to be aquired or get unicorn status but to stay soundly profitable year-after-year. This was one of the reasons I loved WhatsApp so much early on when that seemed to be the way it was going: a healthy >1B USD company with no dependency except on users. As the WhatsApp story and many other tells us this isn't always safe, but it should be a safer bet than anyone clearly going the "unicorn or nothing" way from the start.
    - smcl 7y ago
      Was WhatsApp healthy or profitable before it was bought by Facebook? I'm not sure if there's any way we can know for sure, but it all played out like a pretty standard Silicon Valley "unicorn" - couple of rounds of investment by a big VC followed by a mega-acquisition by a FAANG.
      - danielscrubs 7y ago
        Do we even know they are profitable now without Facebook selling user data? But WhatsApp is an insane success story on its own. Back then, around 20 engineers handling billions of messages per day, with their own servers and spending zero dollars in advertisement and using a non-standard language (Erlang).
      - eitland 7y ago
        They had 400 million monthly active users in December 2013. At the same time they had 50 employees I think as well as modest server expenses. They had signalled quite early that they where going to charge money, they had started charging money from at least a subset of users and they were still growing like crazy, 200 million monthly active users since april that year it seems based on the statistics I found. To me that sounds profitable.
  - kyshoc 7y ago
    Financial stability doesn't mean much to the end-user if the product ends up getting killed off regardless.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Profits that don't register for Google can make a sensible business for a smaller company.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Do you think Bebop would have survived if Google never tried to buy it? Or if Google poached the key staff but didn't buy the company?
croon 7y ago
> While Hire has been successful, we’re focusing our resources on other products in the Google Cloud portfolio This is not a decision any startup would make. So there's at least some difference, in Googles disfavor.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  It literally was a decision a startup made. Bebop was a startup that sold itself.
  - croon 7y ago
    Selling a startup is not even close to the same as shutting down while admitting your product is successful.
wil421 7y ago
SaaS Market is pretty mature. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Tableu, and Mulesoft are a few I have personally worked on that are not really in startup mode anymore.

nkingsy 7y ago

Seems like these non billion user products could be sold off rather than killed. The cost to ready the software to live outside google would be worth it for the goodwill alone.

tempay 7y ago
Would this actually be practical? From what little I know about google infrastructure everything is dependent on their in house tooling and spinning projects off is a massive amount of work.
- eitland 7y ago
  I think the point is that Google has been burning goodwill for a decade now. It might not be visible yet, just like the ice cube who has been heated from -100°C to -5°C and still doesn't melt, but at this point it would take very little energy to thaw Googles goodwill reserves. Anything they can do to return to former status as "defender of the Internet" might be worth huge investments for that alone.
  - debatem1 7y ago
    This is a very good analogy for a concept I've tried to formulate succinctly spur-of-the-moment a few times. I especially like that it captures the reversibility of the trend and the energy cost of doing so. Thanks for sharing.
  - robocat 7y ago
    > ice cube who has been heated from -100°C to -5°C and still doesn't melt, but at this point it would take very little energy to thaw Unobviously a poor metaphor. energy to heat 1kg from -100°C to -5°C: 200kJ energy to melt 1kg from -5°C (as ice) to 0°C (as water): 345kJ Water has lots of extremely non-linear behaviours!!!
    - eitland 7y ago
      Thanks! Do you have a better idea? Either another example or a better way to tell it so it becomes true? I guess I could start somewhere closer to 0°K, but that wouldn't mean much I guess?

kkarakk 7y ago

The only time people jump onboard google products is at launch. Being the premier tech company in the world that actually launches things like this brings significant network effects that help boost these products past noise threshold. After that it doesn't matter coz you'll probably move on to the next company(2-3 years) and it won't matter that the google product you adopted failed/was shut down since you'll be in a different tech time/space continuum bubble and will have adopted newer things. This is really a problem of Google just not bothering to invest in things long term. It's a known problem and I don't think Google cares coz none of these products really disrupt the market or bring in the big bucks which is all tech giants care about.

goatinaboat 7y ago
Interesting dynamic, this is the same as offshoring. Make a decision that is beneficial in the short term, get that bonus or promotion out of it, run away before the much greater long term downside catches up with you. But it can only work in an environment that encourages job hopping... which we have. Hey companies, if you want people to make good decisions then you need to invest in retention above all else.

tylerl 7y ago

Bebop was an acqui-hire, not a real product. All they wanted was the CEO. I don't think anyone took the product seriously except for the person who started it, and once she left Google, there was no reason to continue pretending that it was a real thing.

noahl 7y ago
The trouble is that if you have to understand or correctly guess internal Google politics like this in order to know which products you can really rely on, then it's effectively not reliable. With that said, I'd feel fine relying on VMs, disks, managed SQL, managed Kubernetes, etc. Maybe I'm too optimistic. And Google is giving exactly the guarantees they promised - 1 year of notice before shutting down a product.
- Strom 7y ago
  > And Google is giving exactly the guarantees they promised - 1 year of notice before shutting down a product. This is mostly true, but a bit more nuanced than one might think. Let's take the Go 1.9 runtime for App Engine. It was deprecated on June 27, 2019. [1] Existing deployments will keep working for an undetermined time, however new deployments won't be accepted starting October 1, 2019. That's just a 3 month notice! The offered solution is to migrate to Go 1.11 [2], however that's not straightforward either, because the Go 1.11 runtime is using 2nd generation App Engine, which means a bunch of App Engine specific code that you had working before will need to be rewritten. To make things even more spicy there's already a migration path to Go 1.12 which deprecates every single App Engine specific API. [3] Google is basically slowly shutting down the whole 1st generation App Engine. -- [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go/release-notes https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go/release-... [2] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go111/go-differences https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go111/go-di... [3] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go112/go-differences https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go112/go-di...
  - mogar1980 7y ago
    Note: I work on App Engine. Go 1.11 supports all legacy 1st generation APIs. It's in the first section of the doc [2] that you posted although perhaps we can make this even clearer. We maintained support for these APIs precisely to make this migration extremely straightforward for our existing users as we moved to a more modern underlying technology stack and a version of Go supported by the language community. We absolutely want App Engine to be a place you can confidently build a business upon.

z3t4 7y ago

The cost of switching to another platform should also be calculated into the price when you choose platform.

beardedman 7y ago

Yup. Google a search company, any technology that doesn't impact their bottom line, is dispensable (to a lesser/greater degree) to them.

wolfgke 7y ago
> Yup. Google a search company, any technology that doesn't impact their bottom line, is dispensable (to a lesser/greater degree) to them. Rather: Google is an advertising company, ...

bla3 7y ago

I agree that not becoming dependent on nascent Google projects is a good call for for consumers. But their cloud offering seems to be pretty stable and reliable. It feels almost as if their consumer and cloud arms are different companies.

ivanvanderbyl 7y ago
I certainly hope this is true but I hold a healthy degree of skeptism when using one of their cloud products. This is unfortunate, because overall I've found GCP to be quite far ahead of AWS in terms of product design and integrations.
- yibilabi 7y ago
  can you elaborate more about 'GCP to be quite far ahead of AWS in terms of product design and integrations'?

zelly 7y ago

Everything they do besides _search_ is meant to distract you from the fact that they have an unchallenged monopoly far surpassing Standard Oil in the 1800s.

ChrisLomont 7y ago
Standard Oil had ~90% of refined oil in the United States. Google generates ~63% of all searches [1], with Bing ~25%. I'd hardly call that unchallenged or Standard Oil sized. And as eyes move from search ads to places like Facebook or other platforms, they stand to lose more and more as they don't control where people are. Being so dependent on one source of revenue is very dangerous for them. Interesting fact: Rockefeller's worth was 1-2% of US GDP, which in that metric would be $500 billion - $1 trillion now. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-search-engines-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-s...
- leereeves 7y ago
  > Rockefeller's worth was 1-2% of US GDP, which in that metric would be $500 billion - $1 trillion now. US GDP is around $20 trillion so 2% would be $400 billion. Google is worth twice that with an $800 billion market cap, or 4% of US GDP.
  - charlesdaniels 7y ago
    I was curious and looked up some sources... Here is the source on Google being 4% of US GDP: [0] Rockefeller being worth 1-2% of US GDP is sourced from [1] on his Wikipedia page. Math checks out. More fun facts: Apple is also around 4% [2]. Microsoft is around 5% [3]. Outside of the tech space... Walmart is around 1.5% [4]. Goldman Sachs is around 0.35% [5]. McDonalds is at ~ 0.08% [6]. Boeing is hovering at about 1% [7]. 0 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28google+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28google+market+cap%2... 1 - http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-john-d-rockefeller http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about... 2 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28apple+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28apple+market+cap%29... 3 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28microsoft+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28microsoft+market+ca... 4 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28walmart+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28walmart+market+cap%... 5 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28goldman+sachs+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28goldman+sachs+marke... 6 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28mcdonalds+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28mcdonalds+market+ca... 7 - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28boeing+market+cap%29+%2F+%28US+GDP+2019%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28boeing+market+cap%2...

hinkley 7y ago

Whether it's actually safe or not, there's a plausible narrative that it is not and won't be. When I'm doing tech selection, things like this will keep me from picking Google every time. Especially if I'm working for a large business. One of the reasons big companies move slower is maturity. You are expected to keep doing something once you put it out there. Otherwise you're seen as a risky partner and avoided. The only other way to go is to make the things you support so simple that people could, if pressed, do their own maintenance if you pull a fade. Abandonware with a prayer of being adopted by internal people.