Re:Google Cloud lost $5.6B in 2020
by petercooper on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @12:30PM
(#26016265)
People now expect them to cancel, abandone, or otherwise fuck up any product they announce.
Certainly true for me. They could release the most amazing new thing tomorrow and I'd wait 6 months to see if it's actually going to go anywhere. That's branding and their brand, while not bad, is certainly not "dependable."
How many services with >$10B in revenue/yr have been closed by Google?
Well, the only ones it's had with >$10b revenue historically are advertising, and literally like two or three products. You can't generalize from a small n. But there are plenty of horror stories of being deplatformed by Google advertising too.
Those make money. There's a limited time window during which Google Cloud can bleed money. If that runs out before it's profitable, businesses on it can say "bye bye," face bitrot, or see huge markups due to lock-in.
The news about their Stadia team being disbanded wasn't even a surprise; it felt like an inevitability.
Even from a simple CYA perspective, I could never recommend my customers build their product on top of a Google platform.