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A comment on Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand. Parent comment

Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by PopePompus on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @10:13AM (#19554271)
It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not be out of character.
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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by linsomniac on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @11:10AM (#19554938)
We are in the same boat. My boss came to me last week saying he had lunch with a friend that just moved their services all to GCP and got big savings. But we just recently were impacted by the sudden, unexpected Maps 14x price increase.
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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by saurik on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @02:17PM (#19557030)
Similar drastic changes happened to AppEngine, where Google let it rot for something like a year with increasing, extremely bad, latencies and then a sudden very large pricing model shift that made it much more expensive. I was an early adopter of AppEngine, and just can't imagine ever screwing around with Google cloud technology ever again.
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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by Moru on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @03:31AM (#19561492)
We got stuck there too, moving away everything to alternatives. Just analytics left to remove now.
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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by jfasi on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @11:12AM (#19554949)
I can’t share with you how much GCP is making in revenue, but I can assure you it’s enough that it won’t get dropped, ever. I’ll put my money where my mouth is: I’m now preparing to expand my own team’s operations into GCP and away from AWS because of how good their ML offerings are.
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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by jdgoesmarching on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @12:36PM (#19555983)
Maybe the core product won't go away, but you could still see the damage from this approach in features or services you depend on within GCP. Not to mention Google's love for mixing around interfaces every five seconds (with poor documentation of course).

Consistency and reliability matter more than flashy new tech. I wish the culture at Google would understand that.

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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by compiler-guy on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @12:57PM (#19556242)
People were saying this about Google+ for years. "It's a 'bet the company' level of commitment."

Yet here we are.

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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by jfasi on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @02:15PM (#19557014)
Maybe from the outside it seemed that way, but from the inside just about everyone except Vic Gundotra and his org, no one considered it a serious contender. Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business, meanwhile the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.
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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by Jasper_ on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @05:33PM (#19558802)
> No one expects an instant success. But even if this week’s launch evokes snark or yawns, Google will keep at it. Google+ is not a product like Buzz or Wave where the company’s leaders can chalk off a failure to laudable ambition and then move on. “We’re in this for the long run,” says Ben-Yair. “This isn’t like an experiment. We’re betting on this, so if obstacles arise, we’ll adapt.”

> “I don’t really see what Google’s alternative is,” says Smarr. “People are going to be a fundamental layer of the internet. There’s no going back.”

From Inside Google+, published in Wired Magazine in 2011. As the article mentions, Google started dismantling Google+ in 2014. Three years appears to be the upper limit of their patience for "the long run". https://www.wired.com/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/

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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by PopePompus on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @05:03PM (#19558548)
So what you're saying is that when an organization is considering using a Google product, it needs to track down some Google employees and speak with them privately, to see if the company is really serious about supporting it?
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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by iainmerrick on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @05:51PM (#19558939)
Just about everyone I know knew Google+ was misguided and orthogonal to the business

I agree with that, but even so, the company leadership bought into Google+ in a big way, for a long time. It's incorrect to say it didn't have a huge effect on the company's direction and (perhaps indirectly) on just about every developer working there.

the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.

Why then is it so far behind AWS in feature set and market share? Google's data centers and internal infrastructure were way ahead of the competition for years, but they were slow and reluctant to open them up.

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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by compiler-guy on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @03:01PM (#19557477)
When you "bet the company", you are committing to making it your business. It's a plan to pivot to that being the most important thing you do.
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Re:Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand by hcnews on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @01:11AM (#19560934)
FYI, GCP can't be dropped tomorrow because of legal/toc. Even dropping/changing non-beta features requires a looooong notification period (think 1+ year). Enterprise customers really like to secure their bases.

Source: Xoogler

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