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Google should just go ahead and shut down their entire Cloud business. I mean, nobody in their right mind would build a business or anything substantial on top

Google should just go ahead and shut down their entire Cloud business. I mean, nobody in their right mind would build a business or anything substantial on top of any Google provided service, and the hobbyist market can't be that big. Just go ahead and drop out Google, and quit fucking wasting everybody's time.

radiojasper 4y ago
I just read an article that Discord is heavily relying on Google Cloud [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093
- btgeekboy 4y ago
  Luckily, it sounds as if they’re relying mostly on lower level primitives vs. these higher level abstractions that are more likely to be discontinued.
enos_feedler 4y ago
Hobbyist market is also not using gcp and more likely using digital ocean or similar
Animats 4y ago
Yes. They already angered the game dev community, and few believe Stadia will stay around. This angers the industrial internet-of-things community. You can get Siemens industrial equipment tied to Google IoT Core. Hopefully you don't already have it installed. Industrial controls people think in terms of decades, not months. A Coursera class on Google IoT Core for industrial control started today. 77,000 people signed up.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > Coursera class … started today… 77000 signed up That’s actually just a Coursera marketing tactic. Most of their courses are not real-time and are self-paced content. So, they act like they are starting the course “Today” every day, and the 77k enrolled is the # of enrolled users forever since the course has been offered. Totally misleading!
- api 4y ago
  > This angers the industrial internet-of-things community. Hopefully they'll learn that if it's locked down to being tied to one person's cloud it's likely to become a paperweight in a few years.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    I still think it's generally terrible style to fully depend on external services (and should probably legislatively disallowed), but there are differences. You can probably get a contract over a decade from some vendors.
- drusepth 4y ago
  >few believe Stadia will stay around I think the people that still think Stadia is gonna shut down any time soon are just the gamer blogs/communities that have been running shutdown rumor pieces every month or so for the last 3 years. (Most recently the killedbygoogle guy's "my friend heard on facebook that Stadia's shutting down..." post that went viral.) Stadia's actively signing hardware deals with Samsung/LG and other smart TV manufacturers, and about to expand availability to even more countries. AFAICT most people that actually play on Stadia don't think it'll shut down any time soon.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Twitter users who apparently play Stadia tell quite a different story in every encounter I've had with them.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      I play Stadia. Couples of weeks ago, ToS change. Couple of days ago, an ad on my LG TV that if i sign up for Stadia i get 3 months free, and the Stadia app is very prominently shown in the Applications menu. Same on my ISP's Android TV box. Each month ~10 games get added to the Stadia Pro tier. Stadia isn't going anywhere soon, or the people working in the division haven't been told and have continued spending money left and right with partnership deals, which would be a weird waste of money.
      - effingwewt 4y ago
        'Stadia isn't going anywhere soon, or the people working in the division haven't been told and have continued spending money left and right with partnership deals, which would be a weird waste of money.' LOL, that is Google 101. Allow me to introduce you to the Google Graveyard[1] [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
        sofixa 4y ago
        Very few, if any, of those killed by Google things, are products one paid for, let alone had paid partnerships with third parties. The situation really isn't comparable.
nshm 4y ago
And tensorflow
dekhn 4y ago
Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) bring in multiple billions of revenue a year from enterprise. The company invested billions in new data centers and transferred large parts of intenral technical infrastructure into cloud to build these products over a decade. If Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) shut down, not only will large # of enterprises howl (data gravity is huge), Google will absolutely have no future in any enterprise product ever again. I do expect them to aggressively trim small products from the cloud lineup that aren't worth the engineering investment. IoT clouds were a popular thing for several months and then people realized there wasn't a huge market or tons of profit.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Large revenue numbers don’t guarantee large profits. Sometimes you’re just losing more money, faster.
- psanford 4y ago
  AWS doesn't do this. AWS keeps around old deprecated services that they aren't developing new features for, in perpetuity (e.g. SimpleDB). They might not launch that service into new regions, but they will keep it around in existing regions to not break customers who depend on it. This is a reflection of AWS being "customer obsessed" where Google is not.
  - wildfire 4y ago
    If they were "customer obsessed" even though they are not doing development of a service, they would lauch it anyway in all regions. By not doing this, they make it hard for their customers to be multi-regional. It is easy to spin "customer obsession" any way you like.
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      That's the least generous, and least logical, possible take, and I'm the opposite of a fan of Amazon or AWS. If a customer is not multi-region already, and if Amazon hasn't promised multi-region availability, then the customer has simply chosen the wrong product. It's not in anyone's interest for Amazon to waste resources rolling out a product that they can't sell, just because maybe someone wants to expand their existing use.
Spooky23 4y ago
joezydeco 4y ago
How is IoT a hobbyist business? I deployed a large restaurant equipment project on Azure backends and couldn't be happier. I've made a policy of not touching Google for anything embedded-related and it continues to pay off. I guess, yeah, anything non-AdWords related is a hobby. For Google.
- moogleii 4y ago
  I think he's saying sane businesses will stay away from GCP, leaving the hobbyists, and there aren't enough of them to sustain GCP.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    Not just GCP.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 4y ago
  I think the parent comment was saying that Google cloud is for hobbyist because no one in their right mind will build a business that depends on Google cloud offerings.
- mort96 4y ago
  They didn't say IoT is a hobbyist business. They said no serious company in their right mind would use a Google IoT product, so the only market they have is the hobbyists who aren't deterred by the fact that Google only keeps these services around for a couple of years before shutting down.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    Yeah, I misread that. Thanks.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    Yes, correct. I probably could have phrased that more clearly. Sorry. :-(
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chickenpotpie 4y ago
Are you aware Snapchat has a two billion dollar contract with GCP? GCP isn't some rinky dink hobby computer company.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  well then maybe Google should stop acting as one. IoT core was used by serious companies.
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  That was reported in 2017 and was supposedly a five-year contract. 2017 + 5 = 2022 :-P https://www.vox.com/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spending-2-billion-google-cloud https://www.vox.com/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spen...
- mindcrime 4y ago
  GCP isn't some rinky dink hobby computer company. So they suckered one big company into signing a deal with them. Hell, maybe they even suckered a handful into doing so. But there are good reasons that Google is barely (if that) playing on the same level as AWS or Azure. Last I saw they had about 10% of the cloud computing market, compared to well over 50% for AWS and Azure combined. And I don't think it's any kind of stretch to suggest that Google's reputation for lacking long-term commitment to its products is one of those reasons. And make no mistake... I take no glee or joy in saying this. I was a google fanboy (like many people my age) for quite a few years after Google first came along. And I'm still a fan on many levels. I don't want Google to fail, I just think they are going to fail (at selling to the enterprise at least) if they keep displaying the behaviors they keep displaying. Now the Search and Adwords businesses might sustain them indefinitely, so I don't expect them to go out of business. But as far as selling SaaS services, especially ones targeted at enterprise users, it's clear that Google just does not "get it." And I doubt they ever will. So unless they're going to find a way to change that state of affairs, I suggest they just exit this line of business. It would be easier for everybody, IMO.
Mo3 4y ago
We've moved off GCP for exactly this reason recently. It's enough. They're probably not going to shut down the lower level infrastructure, but they simply can't be trusted.
xs83 4y ago
Unfortunately they have this weird dichotomy where they have some of the most outstanding and ahead of the curve cloud services that make it worth it. This IoT Core thing is a shit show and I imagine they will introduce a partner who will do it instead of them. But there is nothing like BigQuery on the market elsewhere, Cloud Run and PubSub are standout services that others have tried to emulate and haven't got near it, plus everything on GCP doesn't feel like either an afterthought (AWS) or a cobbling together of mismanaged and old-version open source services (AWS & Azure).
B-Con 4y ago
Not every product is in the experimental phase. Google has a long history of experimenting with a product and then shutting down once they've learned enough. Maybe they learn it's not as lucrative, maybe they learn how to build the tech, maybe they learn they're too late, whatever. But it's experimental and the experiment doesn't prove to be the "next billion users" so it wanes and then dies. Not every product is like that. Cloud isn't just some product on a spreadsheet next to IoT Core. The heavy players like Cloud, YouTube, Ads, etc, have massive investment, have dedicated CEOs, and are in it for the long haul. Google's deprecation policy sucks, but it doesn't apply to every product uniformly.

radiojasper 4y ago

I just read an article that Discord is heavily relying on Google Cloud [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093

btgeekboy 4y ago
Luckily, it sounds as if they’re relying mostly on lower level primitives vs. these higher level abstractions that are more likely to be discontinued.

enos_feedler 4y ago

Hobbyist market is also not using gcp and more likely using digital ocean or similar

Animats 4y ago

Yes. They already angered the game dev community, and few believe Stadia will stay around. This angers the industrial internet-of-things community. You can get Siemens industrial equipment tied to Google IoT Core. Hopefully you don't already have it installed. Industrial controls people think in terms of decades, not months. A Coursera class on Google IoT Core for industrial control started today. 77,000 people signed up.

yunohn 4y ago
> Coursera class … started today… 77000 signed up That’s actually just a Coursera marketing tactic. Most of their courses are not real-time and are self-paced content. So, they act like they are starting the course “Today” every day, and the 77k enrolled is the # of enrolled users forever since the course has been offered. Totally misleading!
api 4y ago
> This angers the industrial internet-of-things community. Hopefully they'll learn that if it's locked down to being tied to one person's cloud it's likely to become a paperweight in a few years.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- solarkraft 4y ago
  I still think it's generally terrible style to fully depend on external services (and should probably legislatively disallowed), but there are differences. You can probably get a contract over a decade from some vendors.
drusepth 4y ago
>few believe Stadia will stay around I think the people that still think Stadia is gonna shut down any time soon are just the gamer blogs/communities that have been running shutdown rumor pieces every month or so for the last 3 years. (Most recently the killedbygoogle guy's "my friend heard on facebook that Stadia's shutting down..." post that went viral.) Stadia's actively signing hardware deals with Samsung/LG and other smart TV manufacturers, and about to expand availability to even more countries. AFAICT most people that actually play on Stadia don't think it'll shut down any time soon.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Twitter users who apparently play Stadia tell quite a different story in every encounter I've had with them.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    I play Stadia. Couples of weeks ago, ToS change. Couple of days ago, an ad on my LG TV that if i sign up for Stadia i get 3 months free, and the Stadia app is very prominently shown in the Applications menu. Same on my ISP's Android TV box. Each month ~10 games get added to the Stadia Pro tier. Stadia isn't going anywhere soon, or the people working in the division haven't been told and have continued spending money left and right with partnership deals, which would be a weird waste of money.
    - effingwewt 4y ago
      'Stadia isn't going anywhere soon, or the people working in the division haven't been told and have continued spending money left and right with partnership deals, which would be a weird waste of money.' LOL, that is Google 101. Allow me to introduce you to the Google Graveyard[1] [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
      - sofixa 4y ago
        Very few, if any, of those killed by Google things, are products one paid for, let alone had paid partnerships with third parties. The situation really isn't comparable.

nshm 4y ago

And tensorflow

dekhn 4y ago

Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) bring in multiple billions of revenue a year from enterprise. The company invested billions in new data centers and transferred large parts of intenral technical infrastructure into cloud to build these products over a decade. If Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) shut down, not only will large # of enterprises howl (data gravity is huge), Google will absolutely have no future in any enterprise product ever again. I do expect them to aggressively trim small products from the cloud lineup that aren't worth the engineering investment. IoT clouds were a popular thing for several months and then people realized there wasn't a huge market or tons of profit.

throwayyy479087 4y ago
Large revenue numbers don’t guarantee large profits. Sometimes you’re just losing more money, faster.
psanford 4y ago
AWS doesn't do this. AWS keeps around old deprecated services that they aren't developing new features for, in perpetuity (e.g. SimpleDB). They might not launch that service into new regions, but they will keep it around in existing regions to not break customers who depend on it. This is a reflection of AWS being "customer obsessed" where Google is not.
- wildfire 4y ago
  If they were "customer obsessed" even though they are not doing development of a service, they would lauch it anyway in all regions. By not doing this, they make it hard for their customers to be multi-regional. It is easy to spin "customer obsession" any way you like.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    That's the least generous, and least logical, possible take, and I'm the opposite of a fan of Amazon or AWS. If a customer is not multi-region already, and if Amazon hasn't promised multi-region availability, then the customer has simply chosen the wrong product. It's not in anyone's interest for Amazon to waste resources rolling out a product that they can't sell, just because maybe someone wants to expand their existing use.

Spooky23 4y ago

joezydeco 4y ago

How is IoT a hobbyist business? I deployed a large restaurant equipment project on Azure backends and couldn't be happier. I've made a policy of not touching Google for anything embedded-related and it continues to pay off. I guess, yeah, anything non-AdWords related is a hobby. For Google.

moogleii 4y ago
I think he's saying sane businesses will stay away from GCP, leaving the hobbyists, and there aren't enough of them to sustain GCP.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  Not just GCP.
TheGuyWhoCodes 4y ago
I think the parent comment was saying that Google cloud is for hobbyist because no one in their right mind will build a business that depends on Google cloud offerings.
mort96 4y ago
They didn't say IoT is a hobbyist business. They said no serious company in their right mind would use a Google IoT product, so the only market they have is the hobbyists who aren't deterred by the fact that Google only keeps these services around for a couple of years before shutting down.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  Yeah, I misread that. Thanks.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Yes, correct. I probably could have phrased that more clearly. Sorry. :-(

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

chickenpotpie 4y ago

Are you aware Snapchat has a two billion dollar contract with GCP? GCP isn't some rinky dink hobby computer company.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
well then maybe Google should stop acting as one. IoT core was used by serious companies.
gregsadetsky 4y ago
That was reported in 2017 and was supposedly a five-year contract. 2017 + 5 = 2022 :-P https://www.vox.com/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spending-2-billion-google-cloud https://www.vox.com/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spen...
mindcrime 4y ago
GCP isn't some rinky dink hobby computer company. So they suckered one big company into signing a deal with them. Hell, maybe they even suckered a handful into doing so. But there are good reasons that Google is barely (if that) playing on the same level as AWS or Azure. Last I saw they had about 10% of the cloud computing market, compared to well over 50% for AWS and Azure combined. And I don't think it's any kind of stretch to suggest that Google's reputation for lacking long-term commitment to its products is one of those reasons. And make no mistake... I take no glee or joy in saying this. I was a google fanboy (like many people my age) for quite a few years after Google first came along. And I'm still a fan on many levels. I don't want Google to fail, I just think they are going to fail (at selling to the enterprise at least) if they keep displaying the behaviors they keep displaying. Now the Search and Adwords businesses might sustain them indefinitely, so I don't expect them to go out of business. But as far as selling SaaS services, especially ones targeted at enterprise users, it's clear that Google just does not "get it." And I doubt they ever will. So unless they're going to find a way to change that state of affairs, I suggest they just exit this line of business. It would be easier for everybody, IMO.

Mo3 4y ago

We've moved off GCP for exactly this reason recently. It's enough. They're probably not going to shut down the lower level infrastructure, but they simply can't be trusted.

xs83 4y ago

Unfortunately they have this weird dichotomy where they have some of the most outstanding and ahead of the curve cloud services that make it worth it. This IoT Core thing is a shit show and I imagine they will introduce a partner who will do it instead of them. But there is nothing like BigQuery on the market elsewhere, Cloud Run and PubSub are standout services that others have tried to emulate and haven't got near it, plus everything on GCP doesn't feel like either an afterthought (AWS) or a cobbling together of mismanaged and old-version open source services (AWS & Azure).

B-Con 4y ago

Not every product is in the experimental phase. Google has a long history of experimenting with a product and then shutting down once they've learned enough. Maybe they learn it's not as lucrative, maybe they learn how to build the tech, maybe they learn they're too late, whatever. But it's experimental and the experiment doesn't prove to be the "next billion users" so it wanes and then dies. Not every product is like that. Cloud isn't just some product on a spreadsheet next to IoT Core. The heavy players like Cloud, YouTube, Ads, etc, have massive investment, have dedicated CEOs, and are in it for the long haul. Google's deprecation policy sucks, but it doesn't apply to every product uniformly.