The argument being stated multiple times doesn't mean it is valid.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all launched roughly as many products in the last couple of decades, and killed roughly as many of them unceremoniously after the products failed. (Amazon execs used to outright brag to the media about how many products they killed, since it showed that they were daring to take risks.)

AWS, Azure and GCP have also all launched roughly the same product portfolios, and each of them killed basically none of those products.

This isn’t my experience.

Amazon supports most stuff roughly forever.

Sure, sure. I totally get where you're coming from.

By the way, how's the Fire Phone holding up for you these days? I assume it's still working well and powerful enough to do your web searches on a9.com, and read sites like the Amapedia and DPReviews. Do you happen to know how many of the Alexa.com top500 sites it can browse, or do you need to ask on Amazon Askville? But I know it won't be able to play Amazon's hit game Crucible, that's a PC game!

If you need to play some tunes on your Amazon Tap speaker and don't have them on the phone, all your mp3s are right there on Amazon Music Storage, just where you left them with the Amazon Music Importer to be played with the Amazon Cloud Player. And the files are safely backed up on Amazon Drive just in case! It's the same thing with all the digital movies you bought on Amazon Unbox, they'll just be waiting in the cloud for you to download them. (Watching DVDs rented from LoveFilm is just so yesterday.) [0]

And let's not forget Amazon's initial core competency of retail!

Just use your Dash Button to order some more books from Book Depository, it'd be a bother to have to go to one of the physical Amazon Books stores. It's just crazy how much stuff you can buy online these days! Shoes from endless.com, food delivered straight to your doorstep by Amazon Restaurants, concert tickets from Amazon Tickets, flash fashion from MyHabit.com, hotel bookings from Amazon Destinations, and all kinds of daily necessities for the family from places like diapers.com and soap.com. And don't worry, if you're bored of these normal online stores (like those set up with Amazon Webstore) and want a different experience, there's always Amazon Spark or Amazon Light for fresh takes on shopping! And for the really rare stuff, there's a good chance that there's some listings on Amazon Auction. Really, the only time I have to deal with local businesses is when I get one of those amazing group deals from Amazon Local (the code for that can surely be stored in Amazon Wallet).

I wonder what the right way to pay in one of those local stores is though... Will they take Amazon WebPay, or will I need to have my credit card scanned by one of those Amazon Local Register payment terminals?

But let's not think that it's all about consumption. I'm actually working on a screenplay myself, using Amazon Storywriter! Once I get it printed using BookSurge, it'll look professional af.

Possibly the best comment I have read on this topic...like ever. Do Microsoft next!

That would be a novel.

I bet if you combine every single one of those products, they have less users than stadia

Book Depository alone was much more popular.

This was eye opening

Those are almost (if not all) consumer facing products. I get it though - most of the complaints leveled at Google relate to their shutting down of consumer facing products. What's Google's track record for removing cloud infrastructure services? In the context of this thread, that comparison would be interesting.

Them offloading domain registration is pretty bizarre

Google recently killed an important firebase feature around cross platform in-app links, not raise prices, no

KILL IT. It’s a feature depended on by tons and tons of customers, that was a far bigger shock for me than google domains, atleast domain infra is designed with migration in mind usually (dns not included)

But google killing of a vital feature[1] of firebase (with no google alternative provided) made me shit scared on if I should integrate with more of their products.

They also randomly jacked up prices of sms authentication exponentially in a day without any major notice and caused a ton of people to get thousands of dollars in bill increase suddenly [2].

Stay away from google is a good idea unless playing russian roulette at work is your hobby.

Every product there is one manager’s ambition for promotion away from being killed and re-invented

- [1] (https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links)

- [2] (https://www.reddit.com/r/Firebase/comments/14cj7au/firebase_...)

You put a ton of effort into this post and it’s all consumer services.

We are talking about the Cloud.

No, we aren't. Everybody complaining about Google having a reputation for killing products is talking about their consumer products.

In fact, if you read just a few posts up, you'll see that in my first message I made the exact point about how Amazon!=AWS just like Google!=GCP. And the rebuttal was that Amazon actually rarely kills products. That's what I was replying to.

If you want to say that Amazon's track record is irrelevant to AWS, just be consistent and apply the same reasoning to Azure and GCP.

This is a good point. But I'd like to dig deeper than that.

Google has demonstrated a culture of killing off services. https://www.thestack.technology/google-cloud-iot-core-retire...

Amazon, on the consumer side has many canceled products. On the AWS side they have demonstrated a commitment to keeping old services alive.

So on a surface level, your analysis holds up. But where Amazon has earned some goodwill by supporting even barely used services, Google has not.

Perhaps they will given time, as GCP is fairly new. But when you are talking tens of millions of dollars in spend, reputation matters.

What about Google Cloud IOT?

Nailed it. When we've had problems with AWS, I could drop our rep an email and be on a conference call with the engineers who run the service a day later. That not for a giant account, either.

They'd also periodically reach out to offer free consulting services that would cut our monthly bill. They were upfront about the motivation: they wanted us to integrate more of their services. The upside for us was that we could get better, cheaper service. If you're planning on sticking with them anyway, that's a very attractive offer.

Meanwhile, the support venue for our enterprise Google Workspace account was a mutual support web forum as far as I could tell.

Unless you've experienced both, it's hard to believe how radically differently the 2 companies handle customer support.

Interesting.

A previous client was all-in on GCP. They were not a huge operation and in fact were slowly migrating on-prem stuff to it. GCP support was pretty good. The account manager was always on point and whenever we needed we could have an actual engineer or two on a call with us to troubleshoot stuff and give us advice and general support.

Of course, for less urgent and less severe issues it would generally be done over the course of a couple days to a week in support ticket messages / email but that was perfectly fine.

I've been back to using AWS for a little while now and I miss how much simpler it is to set up things in GCP. Even IAM which I remember bitching about so much during those days, now I just miss how much simpler it was and I didn't realise.

Also if you need Kubernetes, no other offering compares to GKE.

I've been watching folks here on HN speculate that Google will kill GCP "any minute now" for at least the last 4 years, so ya'll can keep holding your breath, I will be having fun deploying things for 1/10th the price of AWS.

Maybe they'll kill Ads next?