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Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this topic. I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say

Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this topic. I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023. > said people with knowledge of the matter. As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw some meeting notes. > The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market. So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an executive level ever. You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level. And finally: > A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this story, but after it appeared released the following statement: "Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate." There may be some truth to these accounts--reality is often between the lines--but this is extremely soft on details and actual first person accounts.

ksec 7y ago
Yes, it could have been Google's competitor making up these stories so enterprise customers would stop and think before switching, it is also better for competitors's sales to pitch on the potential of a shuttered GCP, which you can tell full well if I was a sales I would be referencing this article. And it wouldn't matter of there wasn't even an ounce of truth there, Google's reputation on future roadmap, communication, marketing and product dropping has always been on the negative. Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era.
- echelon 7y ago
  > Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era. This. A thousand times this! Once hero of the 2000's, Google is turning into the villain; meanwhile Microsoft has embarked on their redemption storyline. Microsoft is a fantastic developer-centric company that has made their platform attractive to even Linux users. Google shuts down all the things you use, prices small shops out of freaking Google Maps, won't pick up the phone, ... Google should hire Satya Nadella. Doesn't Google understand that we should love them? That we should think they're a cool company? They've strayed so far from that. They might as well be Oracle.
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    Google cloud head Kurian [1] is a former Oracle executive, how can you expect him to work differently when he has spend decades in oracle. I believe google cloud platform might be slowly turning to be similar to oracle, if things do not change to care more for users. As many people noticed google like oracle started changing their products in such a way as to have lock-in like oracle. So it’s just a matter of time when they start behaving like the old Oracle to use the lock-in to ask for price hikes. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-ceo-greene-being-replaced-by-former-oracle-exec-kurian.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-ceo-greene-bein...
    - bigiain 7y ago
      Interesting observation. Kinda make me consider the comparison with the changes to Map API pricing earlier this year. Exactly the sort of sales weasel and lawyer driven revenue booster you'd expect to have come directly out of Ellison's office...
    - andrewmutz 7y ago
      What are examples of Google changing their products to have lock in?
    - cbzbc 7y ago
downerending 7y ago
The problem is that Google has a credibility problem wrt supporting their products over long periods of time. Even if this particular report is wrong, it's still "true" in that sense. For potential users, why should we take the risk when there are other competitors that don't have this problem?
- shantly 7y ago
  If they'd even make some sub-brand explicitly for "shit we're serious about and promise we'll continue to invest in for a really long time"—and then actually stick by that—it'd go a long way. I think it's having no reliable indicator of their level of seriousness or commitment to a given product or service that's the main source of irritation for people. It's all just "Google" and who knows what the hell that means, this time.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    At this point my imagination says it would take 5-10 years of vocalized committment to any one thing for them to make a dent in their reputation.
    - shantly 7y ago
      I think it's one of those "the best time to start was 10 years ago; the second best time to start is today" sorts of things.
  - asah 7y ago
    In theory, they use the "beta" label for this. In practice, they've been sloppy in both directions, with Gmail being in beta way too long.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Google could fix this credibility problem in a single step by simply saying "We won't materially change documented functionality of services A, B, or C in the next 5 years. Upon breach of this promise, we will pay any affected user $10M". If they did that, I'd trust them. If they breached my trust, I'd get a cool $10M. They wouldn't shutdown the service because of the extreme financial disincentive to do so.
devy 7y ago
I agree your sentiments here. The goal for Alphabet is to make Cloud platform business profitable not shutting it down. From this article it looks like it hasn't been so since 2014 after GOOG gave it full attention. And to be profitable, Alphabet execs thought it has to be within top 2 to be profitable, I am unsure if that's true, given the cloud business is still a slow and painful transition process for Fortune 1000 businesses(some more advanced than the others). Been using AWS for 8+ years since their first inception of S3, then 6 years of GCP. This year I had first hand experience with Azure. I just happen to think GCP has the most cutting edge cloud native technologies and services (GKE is much better than EKS or AKS, IMO; BigQuery is awesome). But AWS has a first mover's advantage and MSFT has the dominant enterprise customer base so pushing additional add-on sales is much easier. Those are GCP are up against. Perhaps the market is big enough to accommodate top 3 players to be profitable. And GCP needs to do a better job in support their product & services not discontinuing them abruptly.
- username90 7y ago
  I feel it would be enough for Google to become a customer to GCP for it to become profitable.
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    I imagine the Search/Ads SRE team would tell the GCP team that they can have their infrastructure when they pry it out of their cold dead hands.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  Google has cool things in GCP, but I struggle to imagine them being _popular_, cool, things. If your product or project is big enough to require the scaling and capacity that GCP offers then you’re also probably big enough to be risk-averse about predicating your product’s viability on a platform you don’t control. The way I see AWS and Azure’s success: they replaced server colocation, dedicated server rentals and shared hosting for application hosting because they eliminated the costs and burden of systems administration and hardware maintenance. If you’re a company that did move to AWS/Azure - provided you stuck to their commodity offerings (App Service, EC2, RDS, Azure SQL, etc) you can move back to your own hardware just fine. For other things like S3/Azure Storage which are hard to move in-house, at least it’s easy to separate that from the rest of your application. But what does GCP have that is cool - but without associated costs of what is essentially vendor lock-in? Without a solid contract/guarantee from Google that some binary I wrote that uses a GCP-exclusive service _will_ be supported for a minimum of 2-5 years it’s hard for me to justify risking it.
ogre_codes 7y ago
> So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use. Google has lost a lot of trust in the community and if Google management wants to avoid this kind of reaction, they need to build a reputation for stability. Years of dropping products people rely has eroded much of the good will people used to have for Google. Amazon doesn't drop products. Microsoft has spent decades building a reputation for having a long term reliable product road-map. Google is fickle and doesn't seem to care when they screw people over by changing terms underneath us. As the old saying goes—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
- ximeng 7y ago
  Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to billing for cloud services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.
  - mzz80 7y ago
    No one likes a poor customer experience. But businesses will always choose a poor customer experience over the risk of a business shutting down. That said, do you have any anecdotes about Google Cloud's customer service? Customer service from Google for app developers is non-existent.
    - __jal 7y ago
      It took us about half a year to get billing set up with them. Completely pointless shit show that basically every other company on the planet manages, with Google's own unique weirdness about talking with icky customers. It was an unpleasant process, and then we dropped them anyway (but not because they suck at billing).
  - 7y ago
gmanstar 7y ago
the problem is the timeframe. the decision is a sound one - at some point google has to cut its loses. but not in 3 years -- thats too early. if you want to be in the cloud business, you have to commit to trying to make a run for it for at least 5-7 years. it will take that long for the business to build
- dx87 7y ago
  The article goes into more detail that it was a 5 year plan. Their source told them about meetings that took place in 2018 and they agreed on funding until 2023.
- servercobra 7y ago
  Google Compute Engine launched in 2012, so this would be 11 years they would have been trying at it. That seems like a perfectly reasonable timeline.
midnitewarrior 7y ago
Given Google's track record of killing products people depend on, I can imagine the hesitation managers feel when they consider moving mission critical applications to Google. Risking losing funding if they don't surpass AWS or Azure is a scary thought. It's a shame because GCP is very good from what I've read.
john_moscow 7y ago
>So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. Stop, do you mean that despite cutting the corners with technical support and having a weaker offering than the competition, GCP is not freakin' profitable?
jacquesm 7y ago
> Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023. No, but it also doesn't say they're in for the long haul in case they don't end up on top and with Google's well documented and long history of killing products you really can't fault people for wondering if it is wise to build on top of GCP no matter what the advantages.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  > Google's well documented and long history of killing products How long will this tired meme continue to have legs for? Sheesh. Google is not going to shutter GCP right after spending billions of dollars on datacenters and fiber cables. The fact that HN is even entertaining the concept is embarrassing and speaks volumes about fall in the quality of discussion.
  - stingraycharles 7y ago
    What you’re describing is actually the sunken cost fallacy. It’s entirely reasonable to assume Google execs treat the investments as sunken costs that cannot be recovered with GCP, because they rationally should.
    - dodobirdlord 7y ago
      Counterpoint, rational Google execs can't keep their jobs after spending 7 years sinking $Bs/year into unrecoverable investments in a product they eventually shutter. Google+ didn't require new physical infrastructure, and the other "Google kills xyz" stories are about small fry stuff.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        The 'small fry stuff' runs in the 100's of projects and that adds up, and not all of them are really small fry either.
      - ric2b 7y ago
        Countercounterpoint, rational Google execs _definitely_ can't keep their jobs after spending 7 years sinking $Bs/year into unrecoverable investments in a product they eventually keep alive spending yet more $Bs/year.
soamv 7y ago
The article does say that there was a discussion about "exiting the business"; that's sufficiently terrible to be news, even without anyone explicitly talking about shutting it down.
DLA 7y ago
Google has a graveyard full of products that have been shuttered. Imagine the risk in the decision - Do I bet my entire organization’s IT infrastructure on a product line that Google may just decide to disappear? It’s a trust issue. Trust is earned over time. I personally hope GCP stays and grows.
ineedasername 7y ago
Saying it might lose funding if it doesn't reach this goal is a pretty clear statement of " we may shut it down"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rhacker 7y ago
> You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level. No customer is going to sink risk into a statement like that. Everyone wants to know that the investment increases and only increases.
Spooky23 7y ago
I think that what you’re seeing here on HN is a big problem that Google has — they’ve eroded the trust that they once had. Perception matters. When you see the lack of trust Google has vs Amazon and Microsoft, you know you have a problem — both companies have track records of less than trustworthy actions.
OldPanda 7y ago
Instead of spending time posting stuffs here, could your Googlers get back to your work to improve GCP's quality? Poor availability, of no help customer support, and slow fix of any problems is killing GCP.
- rnet85 7y ago
  Instead of leaving useless comments on the internet, why don’t you join Google and fix those things?
jboy55 7y ago
I will believe Google is serious about supporting GCP when they decide the job of interacting with their customers and partners is worthy of being labeled a 'Googler'. Since it seems the majority of support and service at Google Cloud is made up of TVCs, with 2 year 'life spans', it seems Google is just hedging their bet, no need to bring people on permanently if you're going to downsize in 2-3 years. In fact, is it entirely coincidental that the goal is to be #1 in roughly the same timeframe as the TVCs are allowed to work? Seems like the same sort of lack of commitment to GCP that Google place in their workers.
richardw 7y ago
Betting on Google’s offering is like betting your business on Bing. It might work but it’s an also-ran. And that’s before this leak. Time for leadership to clarify hard, ASAP. Infrastructure should be built on rock, not sand. Google has sold too much sand. Businesses need to focus on their next battle not finding a replacement API, web toolkit or cloud.
ragerino 7y ago
In regards of profitable, I hope you also consider internal cloud computing usage as it were used by an external party. E.g. if stuff like AlphaGo, Youtube, or the Search Engine used tons of cloud computing resources you should not count it as no profit made (actually loss because of power consumption, server housing, networking, ...), regardless if those cloud resources were anyways unused. Then it's up to your colleagues then to make the profit.
cyberpip 7y ago
Google is an ad company that just happens to make other tech. They need to bifurcate the two in meaningful ways to re-establish trust.

ksec 7y ago

Yes, it could have been Google's competitor making up these stories so enterprise customers would stop and think before switching, it is also better for competitors's sales to pitch on the potential of a shuttered GCP, which you can tell full well if I was a sales I would be referencing this article. And it wouldn't matter of there wasn't even an ounce of truth there, Google's reputation on future roadmap, communication, marketing and product dropping has always been on the negative. Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era.

echelon 7y ago
> Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era. This. A thousand times this! Once hero of the 2000's, Google is turning into the villain; meanwhile Microsoft has embarked on their redemption storyline. Microsoft is a fantastic developer-centric company that has made their platform attractive to even Linux users. Google shuts down all the things you use, prices small shops out of freaking Google Maps, won't pick up the phone, ... Google should hire Satya Nadella. Doesn't Google understand that we should love them? That we should think they're a cool company? They've strayed so far from that. They might as well be Oracle.
- dragonsh 7y ago
  Google cloud head Kurian [1] is a former Oracle executive, how can you expect him to work differently when he has spend decades in oracle. I believe google cloud platform might be slowly turning to be similar to oracle, if things do not change to care more for users. As many people noticed google like oracle started changing their products in such a way as to have lock-in like oracle. So it’s just a matter of time when they start behaving like the old Oracle to use the lock-in to ask for price hikes. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-ceo-greene-being-replaced-by-former-oracle-exec-kurian.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-ceo-greene-bein...
  - bigiain 7y ago
    Interesting observation. Kinda make me consider the comparison with the changes to Map API pricing earlier this year. Exactly the sort of sales weasel and lawyer driven revenue booster you'd expect to have come directly out of Ellison's office...
  - andrewmutz 7y ago
    What are examples of Google changing their products to have lock in?
  - cbzbc 7y ago

downerending 7y ago

The problem is that Google has a credibility problem wrt supporting their products over long periods of time. Even if this particular report is wrong, it's still "true" in that sense. For potential users, why should we take the risk when there are other competitors that don't have this problem?

shantly 7y ago
If they'd even make some sub-brand explicitly for "shit we're serious about and promise we'll continue to invest in for a really long time"—and then actually stick by that—it'd go a long way. I think it's having no reliable indicator of their level of seriousness or commitment to a given product or service that's the main source of irritation for people. It's all just "Google" and who knows what the hell that means, this time.
- rhizome 7y ago
  At this point my imagination says it would take 5-10 years of vocalized committment to any one thing for them to make a dent in their reputation.
  - shantly 7y ago
    I think it's one of those "the best time to start was 10 years ago; the second best time to start is today" sorts of things.
- asah 7y ago
  In theory, they use the "beta" label for this. In practice, they've been sloppy in both directions, with Gmail being in beta way too long.
londons_explore 7y ago
Google could fix this credibility problem in a single step by simply saying "We won't materially change documented functionality of services A, B, or C in the next 5 years. Upon breach of this promise, we will pay any affected user $10M". If they did that, I'd trust them. If they breached my trust, I'd get a cool $10M. They wouldn't shutdown the service because of the extreme financial disincentive to do so.

devy 7y ago

I agree your sentiments here. The goal for Alphabet is to make Cloud platform business profitable not shutting it down. From this article it looks like it hasn't been so since 2014 after GOOG gave it full attention. And to be profitable, Alphabet execs thought it has to be within top 2 to be profitable, I am unsure if that's true, given the cloud business is still a slow and painful transition process for Fortune 1000 businesses(some more advanced than the others). Been using AWS for 8+ years since their first inception of S3, then 6 years of GCP. This year I had first hand experience with Azure. I just happen to think GCP has the most cutting edge cloud native technologies and services (GKE is much better than EKS or AKS, IMO; BigQuery is awesome). But AWS has a first mover's advantage and MSFT has the dominant enterprise customer base so pushing additional add-on sales is much easier. Those are GCP are up against. Perhaps the market is big enough to accommodate top 3 players to be profitable. And GCP needs to do a better job in support their product & services not discontinuing them abruptly.

username90 7y ago
I feel it would be enough for Google to become a customer to GCP for it to become profitable.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  I imagine the Search/Ads SRE team would tell the GCP team that they can have their infrastructure when they pry it out of their cold dead hands.
DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
Google has cool things in GCP, but I struggle to imagine them being _popular_, cool, things. If your product or project is big enough to require the scaling and capacity that GCP offers then you’re also probably big enough to be risk-averse about predicating your product’s viability on a platform you don’t control. The way I see AWS and Azure’s success: they replaced server colocation, dedicated server rentals and shared hosting for application hosting because they eliminated the costs and burden of systems administration and hardware maintenance. If you’re a company that did move to AWS/Azure - provided you stuck to their commodity offerings (App Service, EC2, RDS, Azure SQL, etc) you can move back to your own hardware just fine. For other things like S3/Azure Storage which are hard to move in-house, at least it’s easy to separate that from the rest of your application. But what does GCP have that is cool - but without associated costs of what is essentially vendor lock-in? Without a solid contract/guarantee from Google that some binary I wrote that uses a GCP-exclusive service _will_ be supported for a minimum of 2-5 years it’s hard for me to justify risking it.

ogre_codes 7y ago

> So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use. Google has lost a lot of trust in the community and if Google management wants to avoid this kind of reaction, they need to build a reputation for stability. Years of dropping products people rely has eroded much of the good will people used to have for Google. Amazon doesn't drop products. Microsoft has spent decades building a reputation for having a long term reliable product road-map. Google is fickle and doesn't seem to care when they screw people over by changing terms underneath us. As the old saying goes—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

ximeng 7y ago
Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to billing for cloud services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.
- mzz80 7y ago
  No one likes a poor customer experience. But businesses will always choose a poor customer experience over the risk of a business shutting down. That said, do you have any anecdotes about Google Cloud's customer service? Customer service from Google for app developers is non-existent.
  - __jal 7y ago
    It took us about half a year to get billing set up with them. Completely pointless shit show that basically every other company on the planet manages, with Google's own unique weirdness about talking with icky customers. It was an unpleasant process, and then we dropped them anyway (but not because they suck at billing).
- 7y ago

gmanstar 7y ago

the problem is the timeframe. the decision is a sound one - at some point google has to cut its loses. but not in 3 years -- thats too early. if you want to be in the cloud business, you have to commit to trying to make a run for it for at least 5-7 years. it will take that long for the business to build

dx87 7y ago
The article goes into more detail that it was a 5 year plan. Their source told them about meetings that took place in 2018 and they agreed on funding until 2023.
servercobra 7y ago
Google Compute Engine launched in 2012, so this would be 11 years they would have been trying at it. That seems like a perfectly reasonable timeline.

midnitewarrior 7y ago

Given Google's track record of killing products people depend on, I can imagine the hesitation managers feel when they consider moving mission critical applications to Google. Risking losing funding if they don't surpass AWS or Azure is a scary thought. It's a shame because GCP is very good from what I've read.

john_moscow 7y ago

>So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. Stop, do you mean that despite cutting the corners with technical support and having a weaker offering than the competition, GCP is not freakin' profitable?

jacquesm 7y ago

> Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023. No, but it also doesn't say they're in for the long haul in case they don't end up on top and with Google's well documented and long history of killing products you really can't fault people for wondering if it is wise to build on top of GCP no matter what the advantages.

dodobirdlord 7y ago
> Google's well documented and long history of killing products How long will this tired meme continue to have legs for? Sheesh. Google is not going to shutter GCP right after spending billions of dollars on datacenters and fiber cables. The fact that HN is even entertaining the concept is embarrassing and speaks volumes about fall in the quality of discussion.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  What you’re describing is actually the sunken cost fallacy. It’s entirely reasonable to assume Google execs treat the investments as sunken costs that cannot be recovered with GCP, because they rationally should.
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    Counterpoint, rational Google execs can't keep their jobs after spending 7 years sinking $Bs/year into unrecoverable investments in a product they eventually shutter. Google+ didn't require new physical infrastructure, and the other "Google kills xyz" stories are about small fry stuff.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      The 'small fry stuff' runs in the 100's of projects and that adds up, and not all of them are really small fry either.
    - ric2b 7y ago
      Countercounterpoint, rational Google execs _definitely_ can't keep their jobs after spending 7 years sinking $Bs/year into unrecoverable investments in a product they eventually keep alive spending yet more $Bs/year.

soamv 7y ago

The article does say that there was a discussion about "exiting the business"; that's sufficiently terrible to be news, even without anyone explicitly talking about shutting it down.

DLA 7y ago

Google has a graveyard full of products that have been shuttered. Imagine the risk in the decision - Do I bet my entire organization’s IT infrastructure on a product line that Google may just decide to disappear? It’s a trust issue. Trust is earned over time. I personally hope GCP stays and grows.

ineedasername 7y ago

Saying it might lose funding if it doesn't reach this goal is a pretty clear statement of " we may shut it down"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rhacker 7y ago

> You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level. No customer is going to sink risk into a statement like that. Everyone wants to know that the investment increases and only increases.

Spooky23 7y ago

I think that what you’re seeing here on HN is a big problem that Google has — they’ve eroded the trust that they once had. Perception matters. When you see the lack of trust Google has vs Amazon and Microsoft, you know you have a problem — both companies have track records of less than trustworthy actions.

OldPanda 7y ago

Instead of spending time posting stuffs here, could your Googlers get back to your work to improve GCP's quality? Poor availability, of no help customer support, and slow fix of any problems is killing GCP.

rnet85 7y ago
Instead of leaving useless comments on the internet, why don’t you join Google and fix those things?

jboy55 7y ago

I will believe Google is serious about supporting GCP when they decide the job of interacting with their customers and partners is worthy of being labeled a 'Googler'. Since it seems the majority of support and service at Google Cloud is made up of TVCs, with 2 year 'life spans', it seems Google is just hedging their bet, no need to bring people on permanently if you're going to downsize in 2-3 years. In fact, is it entirely coincidental that the goal is to be #1 in roughly the same timeframe as the TVCs are allowed to work? Seems like the same sort of lack of commitment to GCP that Google place in their workers.

richardw 7y ago

Betting on Google’s offering is like betting your business on Bing. It might work but it’s an also-ran. And that’s before this leak. Time for leadership to clarify hard, ASAP. Infrastructure should be built on rock, not sand. Google has sold too much sand. Businesses need to focus on their next battle not finding a replacement API, web toolkit or cloud.

ragerino 7y ago

In regards of profitable, I hope you also consider internal cloud computing usage as it were used by an external party. E.g. if stuff like AlphaGo, Youtube, or the Search Engine used tons of cloud computing resources you should not count it as no profit made (actually loss because of power consumption, server housing, networking, ...), regardless if those cloud resources were anyways unused. Then it's up to your colleagues then to make the profit.

cyberpip 7y ago

Google is an ad company that just happens to make other tech. They need to bifurcate the two in meaningful ways to re-establish trust.