Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

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Disclosure: I work for a competitor to both Google/GCE and Amazon/EC2.

I think that this comment is spot-on. Google doesn't seem to understand that the infrastructure business is fundamentally a trust business: as elastic and transient as the cloud can feel, when choosing a foundation, you're making decisions that must stand for years. Not only does Google provide infamously Kafka-esque service when they're down or otherwise unavailable, they have a history of capriciously killing services and/or repricing them -- and one need look no further than the user dissatisfaction over GAE to know that GCE will be lucky to survive its infancy. Indeed, GCE is caught in a nasty catch-22: because of Google's track record of killing tertiary services, the market is very much waiting for it to become primary for Google -- but because the market is waiting, it may well never be. This is a self-fulfilling prophesy that is as obvious to cloud decision makers as it appears to be lost on Google.

Thank you - I couldn't say this better myself. You have captured the essence of a problem with Google - trust.

After GAE and treatment of "non-essential" products under Larry, I have lost the trust in Google as a reliable business partner, regardless of any technical advantages their offerings might have at the moment.

A small shop like ours can't rely on a partner who can change major aspects of a product without any concern for its customers. And when the trouble comes, being left at the mercy of a random Googler who might come to the rescue if you are sufficiently Internet famous is not a recipee for building a stable business.

Thank you, but no thank you. I'll stick with companies who are relentlessly working on improving their products, driving prices down and care about their customers even if their products might be behind in some areas.

Until Google proves that they care and are in this for a long haul, my business goes somewhere else.

Oh, yeah, this applies to personal usage too - good bye Google Reader, my most used Google product...

GCE should be priced "correctly" since it was created after the great price rationalization.

That was for the GAE. Who is to say a new "price rationalisation" might not come for GCE?

Or that they wont close it down, like they did with Google Code, Google Wave, Google Reader and such, if they change their minds?

Now, I know that what I wrote would be considered FUD if it was for any other company. But in Google's case, it's not that people say FUD about them. It's that FUD is the very thing they emanate themselves!

Or, in other words, in Google's case, the FUD is real.

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