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After being bitten a few times by Google unceremoniously shutting down services, it feels like unnecessary risk-taking to build software on their infrastructure

by icey 14y ago

After being bitten a few times by Google unceremoniously shutting down services, it feels like unnecessary risk-taking to build software on their infrastructure.

bane 14y ago
Google's done a great job shutting down much used and loved services. Perhaps it'd be a good idea for them to get behind what they're committed to supporting long term and make some public commitments.
yanw 14y ago
Difference is you actually have to pay for this one.
- ww520 14y ago
  AppEngine was a pay service too but price rise pretty much forced many people out.
  - yanw 14y ago
    GAE had to become self-sustaining and now it's less of a risk for its customers. Google wants GCE to compete with AWS so pricing will be have to be competitive.
  - plorkyeran 14y ago
    It's not so much the difference between free and paid that matters as whether or not the pricing is actually economically viable. The original GAE pricing pretty obviously wasn't, so it might as well have been a free product in that you were relying on Google continuing to want to subsidize it for whatever reason.
    - ww520 14y ago
      How do we as customers know whether a pricing posted by a company is viable or not? What is the criteria for viability? Someone didn't get his bonus because of growth not meeting target? Or the engineering budget has blown up passed expectation? It doesn't mean those will not happen again.
      - wmf 14y ago
        Supposedly all of Google's prices are now and will be viable since they introduced internal chargeback.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
declan 14y ago
When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy development like GCE and GAE? They may have, I admit, but I can't think of any. The point is raising the standard Google Reader/Google Buzz/etc. free examples isn't really apropos.
- gwern 14y ago
  > When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy development like GCE and GAE? As far as I know, never. I've been compiling a list of live and shut down services/products/etc (~299 so far), and while payment doesn't seem to be an important factor (plenty of shut down paid things, including many more advertising services than I expected), I cannot name a service which was under heavy development and was shut down during said development. However, I think that is just because development tends to stop before the final death knell. Reader, for example, used to regularly update and improve during its heyday.
  - rattray 14y ago
    This sounds very interesting -- is it public or can you make it public?
    - gwern 14y ago
      It's not public yet; I haven't finished it (I need to code 4 variables for like 100 entries, since I only thought of the variables partway through assembling the list, and I have 3 or 4 pages to check for additional entries) and the analysis (logistic regression on the variables, and survival curves). The idea is to try to predict future shut downs, but it's turned out to be a lot more work than I expected...
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  It has to do with margins and focus. Companies time and time again sell /shut down profitable divisions, simply because they're not performing "good enough," whatever that may mean. Google essentially has no competition in advertising so anything else is a joke compared to that. Who knows?

by icey 14y ago

After being bitten a few times by Google unceremoniously shutting down services, it feels like unnecessary risk-taking to build software on their infrastructure.

bane 14y ago

Google's done a great job shutting down much used and loved services. Perhaps it'd be a good idea for them to get behind what they're committed to supporting long term and make some public commitments.

yanw 14y ago

Difference is you actually have to pay for this one.

ww520 14y ago
AppEngine was a pay service too but price rise pretty much forced many people out.
- yanw 14y ago
  GAE had to become self-sustaining and now it's less of a risk for its customers. Google wants GCE to compete with AWS so pricing will be have to be competitive.
- plorkyeran 14y ago
  It's not so much the difference between free and paid that matters as whether or not the pricing is actually economically viable. The original GAE pricing pretty obviously wasn't, so it might as well have been a free product in that you were relying on Google continuing to want to subsidize it for whatever reason.
  - ww520 14y ago
    How do we as customers know whether a pricing posted by a company is viable or not? What is the criteria for viability? Someone didn't get his bonus because of growth not meeting target? Or the engineering budget has blown up passed expectation? It doesn't mean those will not happen again.
    - wmf 14y ago
      Supposedly all of Google's prices are now and will be viable since they introduced internal chargeback.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

declan 14y ago

When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy development like GCE and GAE? They may have, I admit, but I can't think of any. The point is raising the standard Google Reader/Google Buzz/etc. free examples isn't really apropos.

gwern 14y ago
> When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy development like GCE and GAE? As far as I know, never. I've been compiling a list of live and shut down services/products/etc (~299 so far), and while payment doesn't seem to be an important factor (plenty of shut down paid things, including many more advertising services than I expected), I cannot name a service which was under heavy development and was shut down during said development. However, I think that is just because development tends to stop before the final death knell. Reader, for example, used to regularly update and improve during its heyday.
- rattray 14y ago
  This sounds very interesting -- is it public or can you make it public?
  - gwern 14y ago
    It's not public yet; I haven't finished it (I need to code 4 variables for like 100 entries, since I only thought of the variables partway through assembling the list, and I have 3 or 4 pages to check for additional entries) and the analysis (logistic regression on the variables, and survival curves). The idea is to try to predict future shut downs, but it's turned out to be a lot more work than I expected...
OGinparadise 14y ago
It has to do with margins and focus. Companies time and time again sell /shut down profitable divisions, simply because they're not performing "good enough," whatever that may mean. Google essentially has no competition in advertising so anything else is a joke compared to that. Who knows?