Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by bshanks on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @11:06PM (#11164495)

Google seems to be facing a trust problem here that its competitors don't, due to its history of shutting down popular services, even those that were being used internally and even those that it had been recently hyping to the press. Due to this unusual context, perhaps it would help if Google were to increase this promise from 1 year to 10 years (or 5 years or 3 years).

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by lisbakke on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @12:52AM (#11164822)

Yep. Their trust problem is also very well earned both from the APIs they've killed/changed and from the long list of Google products in the graveyard.

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by rtpg on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @02:12AM (#11165088)

They've killed APIs/Products, but they've almost always given a very long amount of time to transition.

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by jfoster on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @05:09AM (#11165664)

Also have killed APIs/Products that are extremely difficult to transition from with short notice. For example, they gave ~4 months for the Google Wallet for the web transition, and no data portability for businesses with users on subscriptions.

Stripe, for example, has a data portability clause that allows you to move card data to another payments processor that meets some compliance standards.

https://support.google.com/payments/merchant/answer/6107573?...

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by lisbakke on Thursday February 25, 2016 @01:43PM (#11176644)

Regardless of if you get 4 months notice or 1 year notice you still have to do the work to migrate and you're still stuck with the sunk cost of investing in/learning a doomed platform.

That's why I wouldn't build a business on Google, because they have a long history of killing things when they aren't wildly profitable/successful. A $10m/yr profit product is considered a distraction of valuable engineer time unless it has some ulterior goal for the company.

And I'm not saying they should change -- they do what's right for them. One engineer working on some distraction project could instead be moved to ads quality and end up making a change worth anywhere from hundreds of millions/yr to billions.

But they can't have their cake and eat it.

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by toxik on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @08:10AM (#11166400)

Google App Engine comes to mind. I'm amazed they would kill of such a product at all.

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by kccqzy on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @09:13AM (#11166818)

Google App Engine isn't killed. It's still alive and new features are being added. What are you talking about?

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by matwood on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @09:31AM (#11166938)

The GP was probably referring to the huge price change that effectively killed it for many people.

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by gm3dmo on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @12:49AM (#11164808)

On the flipside, API's like maps have had stable versions that are deprecated for years.

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by sockgrant on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @01:19AM (#11164904)

That's one of the few examples that hasn't burned developer trust. But it's still not a shining example -- there were times of price changes and rate limit changes.

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Re:Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud by dba7dba on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @03:07AM (#11165255)

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. No matter how much power/money you have at disposal.

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