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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 * Disco

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.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  A 100 M $ business.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Thanks, guys. I should have been clearer. It was on that order in committed spend[0]. The business itself is valued in the billions. 0: Maybe I'll say "on the order of a hundred million" next time.
- joeraut 7y ago
  It's 100,000,000 represented in scientific notation. In this context, a $100M company. 1E8 = 1 * 10^8 = 100,000,000 (xEy = x * 10^y).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
gerash 7y ago
I agree that this seems to be a narrative that exists only inside the HN bubble. The fact that a multi million dollar business decision is being made not by running numbers and future roadmap but by one guy in the meeting saying "wait! they shuttered Reader, my favorite RSS reader. Oh no, these other guys killed Zune, my favorite music player. Wait a minute, don't tell me these are the same people who killed Firephone. Ok, we're going with Fujitsu cloud guys" and everyone nodding their head in agreement
- retpirato 7y ago
  you're missing the point. Google has a bad habit of shelving services that people use. If it's never happened to anything you use, good for you, but if I was in a position to make a choice like that I'd be very hesitant to go with a company with such a history of shutting down services.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    If people can't tell the difference between free consumer products and paid enterprise services (appengine has been running since 2008) then they have bigger problems when it comes to decision making.
    - michaelt 7y ago
      Google Maps is a paid enterprise service, and while they didn't discontinue it, they did increase the price by 14x. Of course, personally I chose AWS over Google Cloud well before that, because Google Cloud's authentication is so complicated and their examples so indecipherable.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - QuinnyPig 7y ago
      This was the Hire by Google sales pitch.
- smoe 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
badtux 7y ago
The thing is that a long term roadmap for a startup is 3 years. So you're going to look for things that are going to get you 3 years down the road cheaply, and then you still aren't that big, you have gigabytes of data, not hundreds of terabytes of data, so pivoting to another cloud provider isn't a big deal. Now, scale up to a company that has a monthly IT spend of 50 million dollars. You aren't moving that much infrastructure between cloud providers on a dime. Past a certain scale, there is a huge incentive to standardize on a vendor that has a 10 year time scale. We know AWS will be there in 10 years. Will GCP be there in 10 years?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  I suspect the 50 mil / month guys will choose between AWS/Azure/GCP based on credits + discounts because all these clouds will be around 10 years from now. But it's true that I have no experience at that level (only from 0 to 9 mil / month) and the calculus could be completely different. I don't actually know if they could get greater commitments at that spend but it sounds likely. That's more than half a billion a year. Huge. Perhaps someone who's made the decision on that can share.

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.

jacquesm 7y ago
A 100 M $ business.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Thanks, guys. I should have been clearer. It was on that order in committed spend[0]. The business itself is valued in the billions. 0: Maybe I'll say "on the order of a hundred million" next time.
joeraut 7y ago
It's 100,000,000 represented in scientific notation. In this context, a $100M company. 1E8 = 1 * 10^8 = 100,000,000 (xEy = x * 10^y).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

gerash 7y ago

I agree that this seems to be a narrative that exists only inside the HN bubble. The fact that a multi million dollar business decision is being made not by running numbers and future roadmap but by one guy in the meeting saying "wait! they shuttered Reader, my favorite RSS reader. Oh no, these other guys killed Zune, my favorite music player. Wait a minute, don't tell me these are the same people who killed Firephone. Ok, we're going with Fujitsu cloud guys" and everyone nodding their head in agreement

retpirato 7y ago
you're missing the point. Google has a bad habit of shelving services that people use. If it's never happened to anything you use, good for you, but if I was in a position to make a choice like that I'd be very hesitant to go with a company with such a history of shutting down services.
- manigandham 7y ago
  If people can't tell the difference between free consumer products and paid enterprise services (appengine has been running since 2008) then they have bigger problems when it comes to decision making.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    Google Maps is a paid enterprise service, and while they didn't discontinue it, they did increase the price by 14x. Of course, personally I chose AWS over Google Cloud well before that, because Google Cloud's authentication is so complicated and their examples so indecipherable.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - QuinnyPig 7y ago
    This was the Hire by Google sales pitch.
smoe 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

badtux 7y ago

The thing is that a long term roadmap for a startup is 3 years. So you're going to look for things that are going to get you 3 years down the road cheaply, and then you still aren't that big, you have gigabytes of data, not hundreds of terabytes of data, so pivoting to another cloud provider isn't a big deal. Now, scale up to a company that has a monthly IT spend of 50 million dollars. You aren't moving that much infrastructure between cloud providers on a dime. Past a certain scale, there is a huge incentive to standardize on a vendor that has a 10 year time scale. We know AWS will be there in 10 years. Will GCP be there in 10 years?

scarejunba 7y ago
I suspect the 50 mil / month guys will choose between AWS/Azure/GCP based on credits + discounts because all these clouds will be around 10 years from now. But it's true that I have no experience at that level (only from 0 to 9 mil / month) and the calculus could be completely different. I don't actually know if they could get greater commitments at that spend but it sounds likely. That's more than half a billion a year. Huge. Perhaps someone who's made the decision on that can share.