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> 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 lon

> 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).
- dragonsh 7y ago
  Poor customer service is not exclusive to Amazon, google directly shut the product down which cannot earn search scale revenue. If you see comments below being downvoted by google PR for examples. I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon. Now can see here when it’s critical of google.
  - harikb 7y ago
    > Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon Just curious - how do you "see" this? What exactly are you seeing? I am not really sure if you have some magical HN karma level to see any special activity here. If so, I would be curious what that is.
    - jbverschoor 7y ago
      Same for Facebook. You cannot make any negative comments about react or other Fb tech
  - 1MoreThing 7y ago
    This is the same logic my extended family uses when they tell me that their phones eavesdrop on their conversations to target advertisements. Just because it's possible and fits your narrative doesn't make it true. No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this?
    - throwaway29303 7y ago
      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-pr-firm-google https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-...
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      > No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing Astroturfing and reputation management are a thing. Also, big companies have a large number of employees some of who hang out here and will simply take offense by association, which could be more than enough to explain the effect even if the company itself has nothing to do with it. HN is no longer niche. > Who has the budget for this? Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and whole pile more if they wanted to it would be a round off error on their budget but besides one of those I don't think there was ever hard evidence that this happens. Reputation management is becoming more and more important to brands.
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  Is this story (which popped up on HN less than a week ago) better service? http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-on-google-maps-anymore/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-o... Google letting the Google Maps API rot on the vine even as they raise their rates for developers and exactly zero support for effected users is a perfect example of how they are pulling the rug out. Also, as has been mentioned, if your option is tolerating seriously crappy support or having a service pulled entirely, most people would take the crappy support.
- bigiain 7y ago
  Having said that, AWS also have a long track record of reversing charges where a dev fucked up and ran up a huge bill accidentally. I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived, and then had AWS technical people call and help them debug and fix the broken (non Amazon) systems. I'm not sure there's a company on the planet with a worse reputation amongst devs for "customer service" than Google. Pretty sure they're not going to be winning any developer mindshare on _that_. If your 5-6 figure ad buying team get a say in which platform you deploy on, maybe _their_ experience with Google's legendary "customer support" is different. Buy the only known avenue for developers to get problems with Google accounts looked into by a human being is pretty much to make as much noise on Twitter/HackerNews as you can and hope some random Googler steps in to help...
  - deadbunny 7y ago
    Ah yes the "try getting someone from Google on the phone" trope. I've used GCP at 2 different places. One with a 10k/month spend and another with closer to 200k/month and received the same level of service. In both instances I've had direct access to engineers to get shit fixed when needed, phone/email/gchat.
    - mantap 7y ago
      I've had a real person from AWS support proactively reach out to me because of some issue and I have a $1/month spend.
    - josteink 7y ago
      So if your monthly GCP-spending exceeds the salary of 2 engineers, you get access to at least 1. Sounds great!
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    GCP has a free billing chat support open to every customer, big or small. It's open 24/7, they can reverse charges (although obviously you'll need a pretty solid justification for 4 figures), and they'll happily jump on a call if you ask them to. https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat
- maxdo 7y ago
  Google not just terrible here, it’s just void in terms of customer service. We had an outage due to GCP glitch , there were no way to report even. Recently I heard about bare metal offering , tried to talk most of sales i talked wasn’t aware of GKE term. I wasn’t able to get pricing eventually after 2-3 calls . It’s probably top secret
- plandis 7y ago
  Funny enough I just got an email from YoutubeTV last week basically saying the following: Effective immediately and without warning, YoutubeTV will not have a dedicated channel for Seattle Sounders games (the whole reason I got YoutubeTV was because they were advertising they would do that) and all the previous Sounders games you’ve recorded are now gone effectively immediately (even though, once again, they sold me on their “infinite DVR capacity” that lasts for two years). Great customer service :-/
smoe 7y ago
Googles reputation was pretty much the decisive factor when a couple of years ago we decided to move from Heroku to AWS instead of GCP. Besides a prettier web interface GCP didn't really had anything going for them in comparison for our use cases, so why take the chance of having a rug pulled even if that risk might be quite small.
QuinnyPig 7y ago
This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…” Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Also AWS is just the best at marketing their services. They did what Google did with search. We always say we "Google" things. Developers these days say "Chuck it in S3" or "Run it on EC2". I feel they have a strong advantage because they've kind of come to own the language of the cloud.
  - JimboOmega 7y ago
    Actually, most of the time we say "in the cloud" rather than naming a specific hosting provider. Definitely Amazon has the first mover advantage and accumulated reputation first, but it's hardly unassailable. Still... I think the bigger problem isn't whether or not Google plans topull the plug or not, but that it has a reputation of pulling plugs to such an extent that people factor that into a decision of using their services. When it's something as big a choice as a cloud provider that can cast a long shadow over their offerings.
    - sdan 7y ago
      In addition, I remain cloud agnostic as well. As a student, I stick to whichever platforms can give some free credits. At the moment I have some cloud infra on google and some on aws.
      - dragonsh 7y ago
        That’s a good thing not to tie in to proprietary api’s, indeed every cloud provider is doing it and after Google’s recent management shuffle to bring in management from Oracle making them alike. Try using apache-libcloud to make your deployment and programs cloud agnostic. Also try using smaller alternatives like hetzner or scaleway. Once you go down this cloud rabbit hole you will be hold hostage to whims of these providers, where they can shutdown any service at their will or ask to pay an arm and leg. Also try to have non USA cloud providers as another backup option in the long run.
jacquesm 7y ago
Funny thing about plus, reader and wave: that was the kind of stuff that people who are now in positions to make infrastructure decisions got worked up about. It's the sort of image damage that may have seemed minor and acceptable at the time that can come back with a very large multiplier in the future, especially given the kind of prominence those products once had.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  This was genuinely not a factor when we signed a 1E8 deal with GCP. What was a factor: (non-exhaustive) * Access to their developers for core services * Discounts available * Quality of support * Access Controls / Audit / Budgeting * Dev Tools around Infra * Future Roadmap Not one of us ever would have chosen the shutdown of Plus/Reader/Wave as a factor. As a startup we hard pivoted in order to succeed. No surprise that members of the population of products have to die for the population itself to survive. And the group making these decisions are a bunch of Unixheads who were some of the first members on The Old Reader. We made a few hundred million bet that GCP will be around and capable for the next five years (and probably for the five after). I am confident this will play out in our favour. I'd put money down except for the fact that I already did effectively by recommending the deal.
  - Terretta 7y ago
    “Confident will play out in your favor” ... Do you mean you’re confident this choice will be a decisive competitive advantage vs. having gone with AWS or Azure? Or simply confident they won’t be gone before you have options?
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      I intended to mean "It will have been the right decision to not weight the loss of Reader/Wave/Plus highly."
  - cbmuser 7y ago
    What's a 1E8? I couldn't find an explanation on its meaning.
rodgerd 7y ago
> he 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. This is merely a symptom of the real problem Google has: a contempt for humans that aren't Googlers. Everything about Google - as a company and their products - speaks of an institutional contempt for the normies outside their walls: everything from the interview process through the complete inability to respond to criticism with anything other than a "you're holding it wrong". Google's high-handed behaviour around "oh your account got locked, fuck you", or "we shuttered this thing that people depended on, fuck you" is a product of that contempt. You're a Googler or you're shit.
caseymarquis 7y ago
Absolutely. I like GCP more than AWS or Azure, but I don't use it because I don't trust that individual services will be available long term. Meanwhile, AWS sends me emails about minor service changes that may affect me well over a year in advance. (MS has a reputation for long term support, but the Azure UI was just so terrible. Maybe they've changed it by now?)
- imron 7y ago
  > Maybe they've changed it by now? I think they might have. I used it about a year or two ago and remembered the UI as horrible. I then had to use it a few weeks ago and didn't have the same negative reaction I had the first time I used it.
- mycall 7y ago
  Azure UI is poo-poo'd compared to ARM templates, Azure Blueprints or PowerShell scripts.
devin 7y ago
Eh, I have to point out that AWS has many services that receive such scant updates that they are effectively dropped products. There are a lot of things that AWS produces which never receive adequate polish or timely updates. I’ve been in betas for more than a few new offerings and was stunned at how incomplete and buggy these offerings were. More than a year later, they remain in a half usable state. Google dumps things it’s not committed to making great. AWS maintains numerous things which are half usable, poorly documented, and incomplete. It all depends on the context, but in some ways I prefer drops to half-assed products.
- ageofwant 7y ago
  True. But if I build a tool that depends on a half-arsed service my tools keeps on tooling. Its about predictability. I'll soon find out that I can get a better service elsewhere, in the meantime my investment is not a complete write off.
pradn 7y ago
It's absurd to compare loss-making consumer products with a business that's the only shot for Google diversifying beyond ads and that has companies paying hundreds of millions of dollars over decade+ contracts. Urs says enterprises don't care about this aspect of the Google brand. What they do care about is Google's reputation for technical excellence and security.
- lordlimecat 7y ago
  Windows on the desktop is hardly a profit center for Microsoft, but they have the good sense not to kill their reputation for reliability.
auiya 7y ago
It's also interesting that Google is willing to suffer an unprofitable product for many many years (YouTube) without being fickle and cutting it, yet other products aren't even given a fair shot before getting the axe.
- innagadadavida 7y ago
  Other than profits, YouTube has many problems that no other product has - like dealing with bad content, detecting and enforcing copyright infringements, comment spam, storage costs. After going through all these headaches, the profits seem even smaller.

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).
dragonsh 7y ago
Poor customer service is not exclusive to Amazon, google directly shut the product down which cannot earn search scale revenue. If you see comments below being downvoted by google PR for examples. I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon. Now can see here when it’s critical of google.
- harikb 7y ago
  > Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon Just curious - how do you "see" this? What exactly are you seeing? I am not really sure if you have some magical HN karma level to see any special activity here. If so, I would be curious what that is.
  - jbverschoor 7y ago
    Same for Facebook. You cannot make any negative comments about react or other Fb tech
- 1MoreThing 7y ago
  This is the same logic my extended family uses when they tell me that their phones eavesdrop on their conversations to target advertisements. Just because it's possible and fits your narrative doesn't make it true. No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this?
  - throwaway29303 7y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-pr-firm-google https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-...
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    > No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing Astroturfing and reputation management are a thing. Also, big companies have a large number of employees some of who hang out here and will simply take offense by association, which could be more than enough to explain the effect even if the company itself has nothing to do with it. HN is no longer niche. > Who has the budget for this? Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and whole pile more if they wanted to it would be a round off error on their budget but besides one of those I don't think there was ever hard evidence that this happens. Reputation management is becoming more and more important to brands.
ogre_codes 7y ago
Is this story (which popped up on HN less than a week ago) better service? http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-on-google-maps-anymore/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-o... Google letting the Google Maps API rot on the vine even as they raise their rates for developers and exactly zero support for effected users is a perfect example of how they are pulling the rug out. Also, as has been mentioned, if your option is tolerating seriously crappy support or having a service pulled entirely, most people would take the crappy support.
bigiain 7y ago
Having said that, AWS also have a long track record of reversing charges where a dev fucked up and ran up a huge bill accidentally. I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived, and then had AWS technical people call and help them debug and fix the broken (non Amazon) systems. I'm not sure there's a company on the planet with a worse reputation amongst devs for "customer service" than Google. Pretty sure they're not going to be winning any developer mindshare on _that_. If your 5-6 figure ad buying team get a say in which platform you deploy on, maybe _their_ experience with Google's legendary "customer support" is different. Buy the only known avenue for developers to get problems with Google accounts looked into by a human being is pretty much to make as much noise on Twitter/HackerNews as you can and hope some random Googler steps in to help...
- deadbunny 7y ago
  Ah yes the "try getting someone from Google on the phone" trope. I've used GCP at 2 different places. One with a 10k/month spend and another with closer to 200k/month and received the same level of service. In both instances I've had direct access to engineers to get shit fixed when needed, phone/email/gchat.
  - mantap 7y ago
    I've had a real person from AWS support proactively reach out to me because of some issue and I have a $1/month spend.
  - josteink 7y ago
    So if your monthly GCP-spending exceeds the salary of 2 engineers, you get access to at least 1. Sounds great!
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  GCP has a free billing chat support open to every customer, big or small. It's open 24/7, they can reverse charges (although obviously you'll need a pretty solid justification for 4 figures), and they'll happily jump on a call if you ask them to. https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat
maxdo 7y ago
Google not just terrible here, it’s just void in terms of customer service. We had an outage due to GCP glitch , there were no way to report even. Recently I heard about bare metal offering , tried to talk most of sales i talked wasn’t aware of GKE term. I wasn’t able to get pricing eventually after 2-3 calls . It’s probably top secret
plandis 7y ago
Funny enough I just got an email from YoutubeTV last week basically saying the following: Effective immediately and without warning, YoutubeTV will not have a dedicated channel for Seattle Sounders games (the whole reason I got YoutubeTV was because they were advertising they would do that) and all the previous Sounders games you’ve recorded are now gone effectively immediately (even though, once again, they sold me on their “infinite DVR capacity” that lasts for two years). Great customer service :-/

smoe 7y ago

Googles reputation was pretty much the decisive factor when a couple of years ago we decided to move from Heroku to AWS instead of GCP. Besides a prettier web interface GCP didn't really had anything going for them in comparison for our use cases, so why take the chance of having a rug pulled even if that risk might be quite small.

QuinnyPig 7y ago

This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…” Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.

james_s_tayler 7y ago
Also AWS is just the best at marketing their services. They did what Google did with search. We always say we "Google" things. Developers these days say "Chuck it in S3" or "Run it on EC2". I feel they have a strong advantage because they've kind of come to own the language of the cloud.
- JimboOmega 7y ago
  Actually, most of the time we say "in the cloud" rather than naming a specific hosting provider. Definitely Amazon has the first mover advantage and accumulated reputation first, but it's hardly unassailable. Still... I think the bigger problem isn't whether or not Google plans topull the plug or not, but that it has a reputation of pulling plugs to such an extent that people factor that into a decision of using their services. When it's something as big a choice as a cloud provider that can cast a long shadow over their offerings.
  - sdan 7y ago
    In addition, I remain cloud agnostic as well. As a student, I stick to whichever platforms can give some free credits. At the moment I have some cloud infra on google and some on aws.
    - dragonsh 7y ago
      That’s a good thing not to tie in to proprietary api’s, indeed every cloud provider is doing it and after Google’s recent management shuffle to bring in management from Oracle making them alike. Try using apache-libcloud to make your deployment and programs cloud agnostic. Also try using smaller alternatives like hetzner or scaleway. Once you go down this cloud rabbit hole you will be hold hostage to whims of these providers, where they can shutdown any service at their will or ask to pay an arm and leg. Also try to have non USA cloud providers as another backup option in the long run.

jacquesm 7y ago

Funny thing about plus, reader and wave: that was the kind of stuff that people who are now in positions to make infrastructure decisions got worked up about. It's the sort of image damage that may have seemed minor and acceptable at the time that can come back with a very large multiplier in the future, especially given the kind of prominence those products once had.

scarejunba 7y ago
This was genuinely not a factor when we signed a 1E8 deal with GCP. What was a factor: (non-exhaustive) * Access to their developers for core services * Discounts available * Quality of support * Access Controls / Audit / Budgeting * Dev Tools around Infra * Future Roadmap Not one of us ever would have chosen the shutdown of Plus/Reader/Wave as a factor. As a startup we hard pivoted in order to succeed. No surprise that members of the population of products have to die for the population itself to survive. And the group making these decisions are a bunch of Unixheads who were some of the first members on The Old Reader. We made a few hundred million bet that GCP will be around and capable for the next five years (and probably for the five after). I am confident this will play out in our favour. I'd put money down except for the fact that I already did effectively by recommending the deal.
- Terretta 7y ago
  “Confident will play out in your favor” ... Do you mean you’re confident this choice will be a decisive competitive advantage vs. having gone with AWS or Azure? Or simply confident they won’t be gone before you have options?
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    I intended to mean "It will have been the right decision to not weight the loss of Reader/Wave/Plus highly."
- cbmuser 7y ago
  What's a 1E8? I couldn't find an explanation on its meaning.

rodgerd 7y ago

> he 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. This is merely a symptom of the real problem Google has: a contempt for humans that aren't Googlers. Everything about Google - as a company and their products - speaks of an institutional contempt for the normies outside their walls: everything from the interview process through the complete inability to respond to criticism with anything other than a "you're holding it wrong". Google's high-handed behaviour around "oh your account got locked, fuck you", or "we shuttered this thing that people depended on, fuck you" is a product of that contempt. You're a Googler or you're shit.

caseymarquis 7y ago

Absolutely. I like GCP more than AWS or Azure, but I don't use it because I don't trust that individual services will be available long term. Meanwhile, AWS sends me emails about minor service changes that may affect me well over a year in advance. (MS has a reputation for long term support, but the Azure UI was just so terrible. Maybe they've changed it by now?)

imron 7y ago
> Maybe they've changed it by now? I think they might have. I used it about a year or two ago and remembered the UI as horrible. I then had to use it a few weeks ago and didn't have the same negative reaction I had the first time I used it.
mycall 7y ago
Azure UI is poo-poo'd compared to ARM templates, Azure Blueprints or PowerShell scripts.

devin 7y ago

Eh, I have to point out that AWS has many services that receive such scant updates that they are effectively dropped products. There are a lot of things that AWS produces which never receive adequate polish or timely updates. I’ve been in betas for more than a few new offerings and was stunned at how incomplete and buggy these offerings were. More than a year later, they remain in a half usable state. Google dumps things it’s not committed to making great. AWS maintains numerous things which are half usable, poorly documented, and incomplete. It all depends on the context, but in some ways I prefer drops to half-assed products.

ageofwant 7y ago
True. But if I build a tool that depends on a half-arsed service my tools keeps on tooling. Its about predictability. I'll soon find out that I can get a better service elsewhere, in the meantime my investment is not a complete write off.

pradn 7y ago

It's absurd to compare loss-making consumer products with a business that's the only shot for Google diversifying beyond ads and that has companies paying hundreds of millions of dollars over decade+ contracts. Urs says enterprises don't care about this aspect of the Google brand. What they do care about is Google's reputation for technical excellence and security.

lordlimecat 7y ago
Windows on the desktop is hardly a profit center for Microsoft, but they have the good sense not to kill their reputation for reliability.

auiya 7y ago

It's also interesting that Google is willing to suffer an unprofitable product for many many years (YouTube) without being fickle and cutting it, yet other products aren't even given a fair shot before getting the axe.

innagadadavida 7y ago
Other than profits, YouTube has many problems that no other product has - like dealing with bad content, detecting and enforcing copyright infringements, comment spam, storage costs. After going through all these headaches, the profits seem even smaller.