> Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing At least in the cloud computing space

> Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing At least in the cloud computing space, Google is an also-ran thanks to Amazon. They were able to play this game with Maps because they didn't have a healthy competitor. If they screwed with pricing as a distant second place competitor they'd be toast. > This one choice by the maps team likely cost Google significantly in the medium to long term, if any other companies realized the same things we did. It definitely did. What they did with Maps is exactly why I would never, ever consider running anything critical with Google.