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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

I think folks can finally accurately model what Google is going to kill... GCP surely wouldn't be on that list? ;)

> You can pretty accurately model what they will and won't do with this one unusual insight that they're a business... But "It's a Google product" is a weak signal about whether it's going to get killed, and there are many stronger signals. Let me know when they kill Ads and Cloud.

-u/geofft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30353025

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GCP's profit

* 2018: -4.3B USD

* 2019: -4.6B USD

* 2020: -5.6B USD

* 2021: -3.1B USD

(https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/02/alphabet_q4_2021/)

I realize Google is making a bet on the long term of cloud, but... it's continuing to bleed money making that investment. Meanwhile, AWS is also seeing large growth numbers while remaining very profitable.

So, while I get the "investment for the long term" angle that Google is pitching for GCP, how long will they decide to continue making that investment while they lose money on it, chasing a profitable AWS

How can they lose money at the prices they charge? They already had all the expertise to run data centers and build infrastructure. I get that there's development effort, but how can you bleed billions annually over years? Or do they discount that heavily for large customers?

I believe Cloud is an investor's playground at this point, given the huge opportunity that it presents. The fact that AWS makes a profit is due to its market position, which IBM Cloud, Oracle, Azure, and GCP have been chipping away at steadily, even if slowly. For GCP and AWS, I believe missing out on GitHub was a big mistake. Though, I fully expect GCP to loosen the purse strings for similar companies in the near future, esp given Azure/Microsoft have been on a tear of late.

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