That's correct.

Selling access to the Google maps API is wholly superfluous to Google's business model. Certainly, it doesn't clock anywhere near a billion in revenue.

Prices have gone up because Google doesn't have any interest in sustaining the product. The total addressable market is miniscule by comparison to cloud or even enterprise productivity apps.

Shouldn’t that also give you pause that Google is known not to care about products that are not its main revenue driver and will abandon them?

It doesn’t matter how large the “addressable market” is if Google doesn’t have the will or talent to compete. Social is also a large market, how did that work out for Google?

Isn’t that the entire pitch of every startup? “If we just get 10% of the market, we will be huge”.

And “revenue” is meaningless is GCP profitable? There was a submission on the front page of HN yesterday about Google’s management not being happy about how GCP waS doing and they have three years to turn it around or “lose funding”.

The lack of ease with which one gets into and out of the cloud computing business will preclude Google from killing off the GCP products with the same wanton disregard for customers as they demonstrated with social and others.

At worst, they'll sell off or divest the business entirely. They'll expose themselves to tremendous liability if they attempt to wind it down like their other properties.

It doesn't even matter as much if Google gets out of "cloud" as it matters if Google decides to kill one of its cloud offering that you depend on. If I were on GCP and building a service that is using 5 Google features one of them happened to be the Maps API and the other 4 came under the "Cloud" umbrella, it would be little solace that Maps wasn't part of GCP when they raised the prices 15x.

On the other hand, AWS announced something as minor as that they were discontinuing one form of accessing publicly available S3 urls that was deprecated in 2010 for the newer one. After a vocal outcry from the internet about how many websites that it would break, they backtracked:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-...

On the otherhand, how many Urls were broken when Google discontinued it's link shorterning service?

Google has shown time and time again that it can't be relied upon for any important infrastructure.

I get your point, but you keep supporting it with examples of products that are well outside the auspices of the GCP business unit.

Yes, it's true that Google capriciously kills products for various business reasons without any regard for customer sentiment. My counter-point to that is that GCP products exist under different conditions, specifically legal and business realities. They have contractual obligations to corporations with very large legal departments. There is also the business reality that if they're going to compete with AWS and Azure then to be competitive they have to behave in similar ways. If they piss on customer sentiment as they have with their b2c services, they'll fail and I think this is very clear to them.

That's not to say that they aren't already failing. As I mentioned up thread, their support is laughably bad and when pressed about that fact, they don't seem to actually acknowledge how that could be a problem.