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I can't imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that's already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when they'll abandon
by mrosett 7y ago
I can't imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that's already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when they'll abandon cloud. How could anyone in their right mind start building on GCP? They may as well shut it down today.
- Jyaif 7y ago"That timeline was devised early last year, after an intense monthslong debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Information." Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.
- mrosett 7y agoI think you underestimate how political Google has become internally.
- dralley 7y agoThe extent to which Google and Microsoft have switched places from where they were a decade ago is hilarious. https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000000-480-359.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000...
- Qub3d 7y agoHah, I love that comic. Here's the full one: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
- tazjin 7y agoThat comic, by the way, is one of Manu Cornet's Goomics (i.e. originally Google-internal comics).
- dredmorbius 7y agoGoogle hasn't replaced Microsoft. It's joined it.
- Jamwinner 7y agoThe irony of an AMP link..
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Aperocky 7y agoI picture search engine team laughing secretly (or openly?) looking at this post? Is that an accurate imagination? I don't work at google so I have no idea of knowing what it's like.
- pinewurst 7y agoWhy? They're the people (including ads) that keep the company afloat. GCP is just another sideshow, albeit a large one.
- foobiekr 7y agoFor one thing, there is a lot of resentment about their lower quality bar. I am not a googler and never have been, but GCP has hired a lot of people I wouldn't hire even on a dare.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xvector 7y agoIronic, because GCP's user experience was great and there's some really cool tech that went into it. Turns out that setting absurdly high hiring bars doesn't mean much if you don't make products people like, and kill off the ones that people do.
- jbigelow76 7y agoThis leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients. You can't plant a leak, if it's planted by a 3rd party it's either a lie it's or a leak.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y agoStadia would probably crumble alongside GCP by necessity too, right?
- sylens 7y agoStadia is a brute force attempt to grow GCP revenue
- mikepurvis 7y agoThe Stadia pro tier fee is just $9.99/mo. The GPU and CPU you could consume playing a AAA game on that (yes, even on the purported "medium" settings) for just a few hours a day surely far exceeds what it could be sold for wholesale.
- sylens 7y agounless all those compute resources are just sitting idle anyway, so why not get something for them, even at a (deep) loss
- throwawayhhakdl 7y agoBecause usage degrades hardware?
- shantly 7y agoDon't forget that they value new ways of spying on users at a non-zero dollar amount, and probably intended to slap ads all over the interface (maybe—maybe—not the games themselves) to make up the difference, or at least were holding that possibility in reserve in case it was needed or they just wanted to kick returns up a notch later (I'd be shocked if it didn't come up in any "decks" used to sell the project internally).
- mikepurvis 7y agoFair, and that was certainly the YouTube model— years of free video hosting to saturate the market, now preroll and interstitials everywhere with "YouTube Premium" just a click away.
- Analemma_ 7y agoAgreed, this is a disaster. A lot of leaks simply don't matter all that much-- Apple might get annoyed at iPhone leaks, but they probably don't affect sales one bit-- but this is dead serious. I hope Google's C-suite is treating this article as the PR equivalent of a Sev-1 servers-on-fire emergency, because it is. If they don't come out swinging today and announcing that they're all-in on GCP for the long haul, it's toast. It may be toast even if they do.
- Lammy 7y agoe: nm :)
- QuinnyPig 7y agoIt’s an industry standard term: https://response.pagerduty.com/before/severity_levels/ https://response.pagerduty.com/before/severity_levels/
- milesward 7y agoUrs, as is typical, responded to the concern prior to the emergency: https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1187607276988723200?s=19 https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1187607276988723200?s=19
- coldpie 7y agoSomeone needs to invent an adblock for stupid meme gifs. That page is fucking unreadable, holy cow.
- fredley 7y agoHow about the leak where they were debating killing it off?
- mrosett 7y agoI was thinking of both of those (considering killing it + the 2023 deadline) as a single leak.
- xvector 7y agoSomeone re-titled this HN post to be way more pro-Google.
- trenning 7y agoWhat was the original title? This comment chain reads a little confusing now.
- xvector 7y agoSomething along the lines of "Google execs considered cutting GCP, later decided to set 2023 as a deadline for improved financial performance." A few months ago, someone I know who is close to the issue mentioned something along these exact lines to me. I shortly moved all of my GCP projects to a self-hosted server. Glad I did it.
- robbya 7y agoI'm curious what sorts of things you had running and how complex moving off was. I'd expect any cut to have some announcement period, which I'd expect to be longer than a few months, so you may not have needed to migrate so soon.
- throw1234651234 7y agoSo much for the usefulness of my GCP Cloud Architect cert...
- headmelted 7y agoGlass half full. Think how good your rates might be for the last six months of 2022!
- prepend 7y agoMaybe this helps GCP as the leak now makes this reputational for GOOG. They’ll have to keep it running to prevent people leaving because of the leak so they’ll do something drastic like pledge 10 years of support or something. This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stuff better and I think Microsoft has bet the whole company on azure).
- ksec 7y agoIt always seems to me Google won the Search Engine battle, ads became their revenue source, and that is it. Android came out of necessity and stupidity of Microsoft at the time. Comparatively speaking they are incompetent both Technically and Manageability, compared to Amazon and Azure, or to better phase it compared to Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella. It remains to be seen now Google CEO Sundar Pichai, now also Alphabet CEO will change. ( I could never understand how Google Cloud also had a CEO )
- t34543 7y agoGoogle could very well be a one hit wonder. Coming from someone who works at a company with one successful product and many failed ones: Maybe they are too wealthy to want a second success. Life is cozy.
- myko 7y agoIn addition to search I'd say: - Gmail - Android (and Google Play) - Drive - Maps - Chromecast - Google Home - YouTube (+Premium) are super successful.
- tigershark 7y agoIf the metric for success is revenue then, no, they are not by any sensible measure super successful. Their revenue combined it’s a small fraction of search/ads.
- Koremat6666 7y agoCTOs and CEOs who matter do not give shit about these sort of leaks. Google cloud is unlikely going anywhere because it is the same thing on which Google runs. Unless Google itself is shutting down the marginal cost of providing GCP to the rest of the world is less (still in billions though). What would one prefer ? Google top brass not setting deadline to beat competition? Google not trying to be market leader ?
- QuinnyPig 7y agoIt’s not, though. Search and Adsense still run on Borg, not GCP.
- headmelted 7y agoAgreed. Google obviously has a firm grip on what they’re willing to call unacceptable losses for an investment, but they need to realise that there is reputation damage every time they axe one of these projects that they don’t seem to be accounting for at all in their decision-making.
- markdown 7y agoNice try, Bezos.
- manigandham 7y agoNo they won't. This is ridiculous hyperbole. They've barely shuttered any real enterprise projects and even those were miniscule in usage. Google is a trillion-dollar company and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads platform. It's not going anywhere.
- xvector 7y ago> No they won't [shutter GCP]. This is ridiculous hyperbole. From the article: > The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
- jedmeyers 7y ago>> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely > That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP. I fail to see how this is even a reason to get off GCP, yet a good one.
- jacquesm 7y agoThe fact that it was on the table indicates that it could be on the table again at some point in the future. These are the wrong signals to send.
- allovernow 7y agoThe fact that it was mentioned in a meeting doesn't mean it was on the table. I'd more concerned with management if they weren't talking about exit points for a risky venture. A perfectly necessary point of consideration and I don't doubt that the same topic came up at Amazon and Microsoft.
- jacquesm 7y agoFor Google, if this is still a 'risky venture' then they are simply in the wrong business, they have the scale and should be able to offer their infrastructure at a cost that is quite profitable. There is plenty wrong with Amazon but they have never ever given off signals that they might withdraw their infrastructure offerings from the market. Microsoft also hasn't but then again, they do have a history of launching stuff and withdrawing it again (Xbox the notable exception, that took forever to take off and they stuck with it). Google has taken products off the market not because they weren't profitable but because they weren't profitable enough. That's the nightmare of early infrastructure adopters who will - by that time - be bound hand and feet. If you're in competition with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and you intend to go after the same customer profiles then you would do well to ensure that your messaging is what those customers expect and that every outward signal you give is that you're in it for the long haul, with a much longer horizon than the companies that are going to be your customers can oversee so that the trust becomes implicit. That way if some internal document gets released it doesn't look as though you are still undecided. Anyway, no need to take my word for this, let's just see how it plays out in the longer term.
- avocado4 7y agoCloud is making a bank for Google and growing triple digits YOY. They are not abandoning it. They do want to pass the competition, obviously.