Google also puts a lot of weight in certain nuances that get overlooked and then quickly forgotten in the Internet's memory.

Your first example: App Engine price hike happened when App Engine departed preview, not after the service had already been intended for mission-critical production use.

Your second example: what they're now calling Google Maps Platform has never been part of Google Cloud Platform, is only relatively recently in a nearby part of the org chart & branding structure (aka Google Cloud which also includes Chrome and Android and G Suite), and has never been subjected to the Google Cloud Platform Deprecation Policy.

Yes, this is a communication failure on Google's part and I'm not blaming the Internet for the common misimpression. But Google's substantive actions in these price changes can be distinguished from how they approach generally available and policy-covered services within GCP, and customers can plan on that basis. (Similarly with G Suite - one should plan differently for core G suite services covered by the G Suite terms and SLA, as compared to other additional Google services that one might use with G Suite.)

Yeah, that stuff isn't part of Google Cloud Platform.

But trust in the stability of products can't be siloed that easily.

With different communication that's harder to misunderstand, it would have been possible for Google to get a much better trust and expectations outcome from exactly the same substantive price changes (at least for GAE and GCP if not Maps).

I think we're mostly or entirely agreeing?

The cloud service price changes maybe. But I'm more focused on things like maps, and the services they shut down.

They can make statements about which things have promises and which don't, but it still causes worry until there's a really good track record.

Yeah. I'm saying that Google Cloud Platform (which does not include Maps) has a good track record with respect to their generally available services, as does G Suite with respect to their core G Suite services. Hell, even G+ isn't going anywhere for G Suite accounts (the turndown is only for consumers).

To be clear I'm not pretending that they've shut down as few things as Amazon (looking at you SimpleDB), but within the product area and lifecycle categories I indicated, they've stayed within what is perfectly viable for lots of companies.

Well, yes, I didn't mention that when GAE launched in preview mode, there was nothing exactly like it, so it had an initial pricing model that made intuitive sense (CPU-based), but was flawed: RAM was much more representative of the actual costs behind the service. I only hinted at that when I mentioned reality.