I've worked at a couple "mid-sized" financial companies (i.e., not "tech" companies, but with a healthy need for various computer products and services) throughout my career where migration plans from one technology or provider to another were measured in years, and would sometimes get extended to the order of decades for larger migrations (e.g. moving core business functionality off a legacy mainframe system). A year or two notice that you'll need to migrate something important is really not feasible for a lot of businesses who would otherwise be very interested in outsourcing to a cloud provider.

A year is an eternity for a start up. But it is a really short time to a large company with complex integrations, a massive book of work and budgets being trimmed every week.

They are talking about the fear of their account being terminated without warning.

Turns out the fear is not unfounded see a confession by an ex GCP Googler:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572131

Google has a history of either cutting products (even successful ones) with poor offerings of migration (i.e. this from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24548876 where they aren't even allowing bulk export of accounts), or cancelling your entire google account for issues in a single product with only automated systems there to respond to you (i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013799)

A year isn't much for a non-startup business. Google has also increased prices in the past (maps, kubernetes) while AWS has afaik never increased prices on anything.

The notice of complete retirement is good, it's the notice of deprecation that is poor.

We can't reliably tell whether a product will be supported for the next N years. It feels non-deterministic.