The take away should really be that posts that get voted to the top of HN do not represent the general public, or even the majority of the tech world. Google Cloud makes $20 billion a year in revenue, about a third of AWS. Google overall makes $260 billion. Its revenues are rising by 50%+ annually.

People aren't quitting in droves, and the company isn't on the edge of failure, as regular readers might believe.

Google is doing fine, and probably will for years. HN is just saying that the safe option is not to build a business (or a lifestyle) on the shaky foundations that they provide.

Google's business is Google's success, not your success.

I’m not convinced anyone is saying people are leaving in droves… but for infrastructure where trust is key, when it comes to new customers, especially smaller ones? I think some are keeping it in mind.

I don't think that's a good conclusion. Most of Google's business is search and ad sense. HN consensus is that Google is doing fine. The HN consensus -- which I think is correct -- is not to rely on Google for any critical functionality which might put your business (or personal life) at risk.

- Adsense as an advertising option makes complete sense. Adsense as your sole source of customer growth is asking for trouble.

- Stay the !@#$% away from Google Workspace, if you're counting on business continuity. It's fine for low-stakes use (e.g. students in a school, where there is no long-term continuity).

- GCE is fine as an option if you have a generic dev-ops infrastructure where you just need cloud servers, and where you can move to AWS or Azure in a blink. Relying on Google Cloud proprietary services is asking for trouble.

- Android App Store is fine for a quick buck, or as a supplement to a core business. Think long and hard before building a business around it, though.

... and so on.

I question what is going wrong with Google at a management level. It's products have been undergoing a slow creeping rot since Brin and Page bailed from the company.

Google Search as a product is declining in usefulness due to a very silly decision to no longer support lexical queries(!) They've built a broken AI fad that delivers nothing but song lyrics and shopping results to long tail queries. The core product is rotting and no one is empowered to fix it.

Google Maps is now suffering from the same treatment

Really sad, I used to love Google maps. It feels like it's becoming worse by the year (at least in Europe). It used to be extremely accurate in predicting traffic and knowing about road closures. Now I can often estimate traffic better from memory and have to look up other sources to know about road closures or construction. Business info is pretty good still, but also only because it's provided by businesses.

I cannot understand how they actively got so much worse over a few years. Especially since they don't suffer the Spam/SEO issues they have in Search.