I've been reading people on HN talk about how Google is burning their goodwill and there will be Very Serious Consequences for a literal decade. Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x.

>Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x.

Based mostly on taking display ads from "only in the sidebar" to "everywhere, including every pixel above the fold if the search term is lucrative". There's not a lot of juice left there to continue revenue increases that exceed general internet eyeball growth. They will still make an insane amount of money, but I don't see how they can sustain past growth YoY percentages.

No, GCP and Google Workspace are great compared to most options out there. Microsoft Family is a good price and I use it as a backup, but the 1TB of storage is per account and I honestly hate Microsoft at this point way more than Google, have fun with Outlook and everything else.

The thing that was the most annoying was the shift from G Suite to Workplace. Before, I was getting unlimited Google Drive storage for $12 a month, and now it is like $20 or something... still, for $20 a month you get basically unlimited cloud storage. No other provider can compete.

20$/month is quite expensive compared to many cloud offerings. It’s only a bargain if you actually store a lot of data which is so rare they can offer it at 20$/ month with the expectation that most of their customers are getting screwed.

$20/mo. is for their enterprise std version. They have plans starting at $6/mo. and $12/mo. provides 2TB of storage per user which is plenty for most users and a much better deal than O365 IMO.

> GCP and Google Workspace are great compared to most options out there.

GCP is number 3 and struggling, with few wins big enough to compensate for the gaps. Workspaces isn’t bad but it’s not compellingly better than O365. Both are held back by management and sales teams who appear to think it’s 2008 and everyone will do the job of selling for them.

As I see it, GCP has successfully become a peer competitor to AWS and Azure (which I was, to be honest, uncertain they could pull off), while, conversely, Workspace is a truly painful experience compared to almost every alternative -- and I'm including Sharepoint in that. It's horribly disjointed, and they've changed chat and conferencing solutions so many times that it's virtually impossible to figure out how to make their own hardware work with their own services. O365 has its issues, but it hangs together as a single product far more successfully than the farrago Google is pushing.

Until you need to manage it, and then Workspace is far ahead of Microsoft. Hence, why at least Workspace has proper DevOps integrations for things like Terraform. Google's MDM is pretty good too, while maybe not as diverse as Microsoft, far cheaper and Microsoft MDM is a nightmare.

Google's stock price is so driven by its advertising business that it is absolutely disconnected from Google burning its goodwill in "prosumer" services like this and some of the others cycled through on HN. Given how large Google's advertising division's reach is outside of Google products, its probable that even a large boycott of Google's first party consumer services wouldn't easily affect the advertising business bottom line. At least for now. At some point they could burn enough goodwill that even advertisers and sites that need advertising won't work with them. (Given what we know from DoubleClick's legacy even before they merged into Google though, the internet in general doesn't seem to mind evil companies running their ads so long as they get paid their share of ad revenue.)

Maybe, but you'd think if you spent 10 years steadily burning goodwill you'd eventually run out of it

It's basically the drug dealer business model: get people hooked for free, then start charging them a huge amount when it's too difficult for them to stop.

At least your local heroin vendor doesn't pretend it's /always/ going to be free, though...

I'm working on drafting such a letter now.