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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

This is Google's problem. Total and complete lack of long-term view. Just look at how many projects they shut down every year.

Do they really think they were going to become market leaders in three years? Come on. The market for cloud infrastructure is in its infancy. The opportunities are there. But you don't build a large business within a potentially multi-trillion dollar industry by being impatient.

And hiring a former Oracle executive just shows how impatient they are... It a complete change of the playbook and it likely means that they are scrapping a huge chunk of Greene's original go to market strategy for Google Cloud.

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There is a difference between their consumer products (which have a terrible reputation) and Google Cloud which does not have the same history and is well-supported.

However there is that Maps pricing change that should be noted, and perhaps counts the same as forced deprecation for many clients.

The Maps example is real. However in their confused current branding Google Maps Platform is outside of Google Cloud Platform yet within Google Cloud, alongside Chrome, Android, and G Suite.

They haven't done any pricing change like that, nor anything else effectively equivalent to forced short-notice deprecation, for generally available Google Cloud Platform services. (The famous Google App Engine pricing change happened upon GAE's departure from preview.)

Hopefully the new CEO can disentangle the horribly messy branding conflation of orgs which work rather differently.

Google is now effectively a conglomerate, even ignoring Alphabet, maybe even multiple conglomerates within Google. The impacts of their org chart on their users shouldn't be this opaque to people who haven't worked at Google. (Disclosure: I have worked there, though not since 2015.)

There may be a difference but they’ve tied their cloud branding so close to the Google brand that the reputation of Google consumer bleeds over completely, good and bad. I’d say they made a mistake in not having a clear branding differentiation from the parent company like Azure and AWS do.

Yes. They probably wanted to benefit from the "Google" brand name for technology but unfortunately it carries too much consumer and adtech baggage.

Which google cloud projects have shut down this past year? Or Ever, for that matter?

Apigee API BaaS, Fabric, Google Search Appliance...

However, I was referring more to Google's general tendency to shut down projects across the board. The list of consumer products shut down by Google is pretty long (Google Reader, iGoogle, Aardvark, Google Inbox, Orkut, etc..)

None of those are part of Google Cloud. But really; I don't see a CTO making an informed decision on which cloud vendor to use by the fact that they liked Google Reader and Orkut 10 years ago. Just like I would not expect a good CTO to base their decision to not use AWS on Amazon discontinuing the Fire Phone in 2015.

Fair point. You're right about consumer product shutdowns not being a good reason to disregard Google's cloud offerings.

I think both Fabric and Apigee API BaaS where indeed Google Cloud offerings. Google Search Appliance if I'm not wrong was part of something called Google Enterprise which eventually folded into GCP.

GSA was a physical box you stick in your on-prem data center. It's about as un-Cloud as it gets, and IIRC its deprecation predates Google Cloud as a brand.

>>>> Which google cloud projects have shut down this past year? Or Ever, for that matter?

>> Apigee API BaaS, Fabric, Google Search Appliance...

Curious, what usually happens to the engineers on projects that get shut down? Do they get redeployed to other areas? What if the team is in a small office?

I've walked past the Apigee office in Reston, VA...what would happen to those engineers...i imagine there arent many other options for redeployment short of moving cities...

Those engineers shop themselves around and maybe move offices. Google often destaffs launched, current products so this is not too weird of a situation for a Googler to be in. It’s not something that happens only to canceled products.

Isnt it a little hypocritical for you to say this? I went through your profile and saw that you were involved with Contactive (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8096597) which doesnt exist anymore. I'm assuming that doesnt exist today because of very good reasons. Same for other companies as well.

Yes, I'm a hypocrite for having worked for a company that failed to find product-market fit and having the nerve to give an opinion about why I believe a company like Google should be more consistent with their product offering and the long-term vision of their ventures.

Thanks for pointing out my hypocrisy and why I don't have the right to have an opinion about anything anymore.

I also checked your profile and you're pretty good at defending everything Google does, but I don't judge you for having those opinions, nor I think you're a hypocrite for thinking in a certain way.

For the record, I upvoted you and I think its important everybody should read what you wrote. As you mentioned, companies need to be consistent with their product offering just like how we expect people we interact with online to be consistent as well.

If I criticize Company A for doing something, and goes around and does the same thing then it'll be very hypocritical of me.

The product-market fit you mentioned doesnt just happen for startup, but for big companies as well. A dollar is a dollar everywhere you go. Just like you found it was OK for your company to sunset a certain product, big companies also decide to do that.

Also, please dont put words into my mouth. I didnt say you dont have a right to say things. You do. But when you do, and please be open to replies.

Yes. Sorry for the angry response. I'm totally open to replies and debate. I just wanted to emphasize that I was merely giving an opinion and that I didn't think it was fair to characterize my comments as hypocritical.

Companies have the right to sunset products if they're not profitable. Of course, they do. I think the problem is that in general people have high expectations from companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. I certainly do, and that's why I think Google should be more committed to a long-term vision in their Cloud business.

>This is Google's problem. Total and complete lack of long-term view.

Diane Greene only planned to be there for two years, so three years in, this change is overdue. If anything, keeping her longer demonstrates the opposite of what you're saying.

It's the first sentence in the article.

not sure you understand just how much GCP grew in the last few years

Google is an advertisement company and their long-term view is getting revenue from showing you ads. The rest is just the means of maintaining the "we are not evil" image so people won't get scared away to alternative search engines. In that perspective, making constant buzz about new projects and closing them once the hype is over makes full sense.

Google Cloud Platform is a separate company/division focused on cloud computing, which has potential to be a trillion-dollar industry. Alphabet/Google could possibly make more money from this than ads in the future.

Cloud Platform is not a separate company, it’s a division within Google.

Do you also agree that if users don't use the value added services of cloud computing it could become a commodity business with very low margins?

Yes. General compute and storage is already commodity.

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