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My biggest challenge with GCP is that I'm still not convinced Google cares that much about this division.

They acquired Looker, fired the customer service staff, and then set it out to crumble. Looker used to be LOVED by its customers but now they were forced to make their semantic layer work with Tableau.

Also, I'm still not convinced Google cares about divisions that aren't linked to advertising. Google Search, Gmail (kinda), Maps, Android, and YouTube are their darlings.

Will GCP be around in 5 years? I honestly am not sure.

5 comments

I used to work in GCP. They are definitely committed to it. Search, Android, Google Cloud, YouTube - definitely committed.

It's the random little things they build too many of and hence close down. They never really understood branding. Slapping Google on everything doesn't help, it hurts. Many things are actually experiments and shouldn't be marketed as more than that.

> They are definitely committed to it.

Google on Stadia:

October 2019 - "It is a long term view that Google is taking"

November 2020 - "roadmap of about 400 games in development right now from 200 developers [...] 2023 is really kind of where we’re aiming our sights"

February 2021 - "building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business [...] remain committed to Stadia as a platform"

September 2021 - "gaming is an incredibly important vertical at Google"

November 2021 - "eager to continue working on bringing the best games and new features to our community of players so that we can help build a bright future for cloud gaming"

February 2022 - "we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022 [...] more feature goodness coming to Stadia too - stuff we can’t talk about just yet"

September 2022 - "You might have seen one last game arrive on Stadia today. It's a humble :heart: thanks :heart: for playing from our team."

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/30/23378757/google-stadia-co...

Bonus comment from Google regarding Inbox:

"With respect to the upcoming Gmail announcement, there are no changes to Inbox by Gmail. It remains a great product for users with specific workflows and one in which we test innovative features for email."

It's not entirely a fair take, since nobody figured out how to make cloud gaming feasible. They have all given up, or are in the process of giving up.

Didn't Microsoft just spend a year in court with their top VPs & CEO fighting against the UK & US governments over cloud gaming so that they could buy Activision for roughly $70 billion?

I believe they had to make concessions with the UK to somewhat outsource the cloud gaming aspect of the deal so that it could go through. This was something they didn't seem to want to do but also forced them to extend their merger & pay additional dividends to shareholders of Activision.

It may have been a component, but no, the fight was over Call of Duty becoming an Xbox Exclusive Title, instead of being generally available on all platforms, including Playstation.

Huh? Microsoft and nVidia (and I think Sony? not sure) are continuing to run their cloud gaming services as we speak.

The market is tiny (relatively) for all of these players. Motley Fool estimates the entire cloud gaming industry is ~$2.5B in total revenue for 2023.

Many of the current services are likely running at a loss, hoping for the hype-train to get people into it.

The reality is, most people wanting to play AAA titles either have a console, or a gaming computer already

The cross-section of people with a 10 year old macbook, that want to play the latest AAA title, have expensive high-bandwidth internet, and are willing to pay ~$30+ a month is just not that large.

I'm sorry what does any of this have to do with Google's lies with regards to their commitment to cloud gaming? All gaming platforms run at a loss in their early days.

> The cross-section of people with a 10 year old macbook, that want to play the latest AAA title, have expensive high-bandwidth internet, and are willing to pay ~$30+ a month is just not that large.

This is frankly an idiotic summary of what you believe to be the cloud gaming addressable market.

> I'm sorry what does any of this have to do with Google's lies

Google is not a charity. If something is not working out financially, or the market has failed to grow at the pace Google initially thought, it is in their best interest to exit that market and re-allocate resources. You know... like any rational business.

> This is frankly an idiotic summary

Well then perhaps you can enlighten us on why the market has failed to materialize? $2.5B for 4+ industry-heavyweights to fight over is pathetically small.

The R&D costs alone to deliver this type of service likely outweigh several years of total industry revenue... yet each of these companies is trying to blaze their own path more-or-less independently.

In short, there is no addressable market, and the numbers clearly tell us that. Do not be surprised when more of the players exit this market as well.

Just because you love a service doesn't make it a reasonable or sustainable offering.

I honestly believe the market will get there eventually, it's a lot easier for a teen to justify a 18 dollar subscription to a parent than a 400 dollar console/PC

The problem is it's $18 today, during a period of loss leading behavior from the incumbents. When this technology needs to become profitable, it'll be vastly more expensive than it currently is. ie. the "Uber" effect.

Think about it... exclusive access to a 4090 GPU for up to 5-8 hours a day for $18? Isn't going to happen. The electricity alone will cost more than that to operate over a month.

That does not even factor in a relatively expensive high-bandwidth internet connection that a lot of the world doesn't have... and you still need a device capable of consuming 1080p, 1440p, or 4K content in near realtime - ie. it still has to be a relatively capable system.

The economics are dubious, to say the least. Emerging markets without a lot of average household disposable income is probably where this type of service will excel - and even there we're already seeing price increases and cuts to maximum daily playable hours.

It is 100% fair because it supports a trend. Amazon didn’t have to continue support for a myriad of AWS products yet still do and maintain backwards compatibility.

Yup, hence the "Many things are actually experiments and shouldn't be marketed as more than that" and/or "random little things".

Google very clearly stated in no uncertain terms that Stadia was a real product that they were committed to for the long term. Stating, after the fact, that it was "actually" an "experiment" or a "random little thing" is not just dismissive - it's pure revisionist history.

Yeah... Google employees just _do_ that sort of shitty redirection, and it's obnoxious as fuck.

Maybe it works in a "We're too polite to disrupt whatever political game you're playing in the hopes that you'll reciprocate when we splash obvious bullshit when we play ours." snakepit that seems to be most of Google, but out here, we're unchained by that political nonsense.

Bonus chatter: We get that you'd like die for your coworkers or whatever, but as people who have no social (or political) investment in either the services or how they're made, these "But they're run by GOOD, PASSIONATE people! I have personal experience with this!" appeals are simply irrelevant.

You were just able to articulate what I hated about Google. Thank you.

There is a reason contracts, contract law and the court system all exist.

Most people and companies don't do things which aren't in their interest after stating they will. It isn't a Google thing.

No one is saying Google has broken contracts or the law. What is it with you Google defenders and your constant goalpost shifting? We are saying, Google is not to be trusted with claims like "we are committed to this product" because they have been caught in that lie several times before. Why are you going on about contract law and "most people and companies"? What you're saying is irrelevant.

What folks at google think and what they say publicly aren't the same thing. It's naive to think otherwise. Look to what actually makes sense for them to do and you'll have your answer.

Internal folks knew google would walk away in a few years if it didn't work. Stadia was largely a group of people out of the failed and left behind Daydream (VR) project.

So why are we to believe statements that GCP is here to stay? They are, after all, statements to customers who need to hear it to make the purchase. But who knows how they actually think?

The whole reason why Google cannot be trusted here is precisely because of their tendency to be inauthentic in their public statements.

I wouldn't believe anything they say. Just look at the numbers. They aren't going to walk away from a business doing about $35 billion per year run rate, growing at 20%+. It isn't in their interest to do so.

"Internal folks" who gives a rats ass about what they think? A company's reputation has little to do with how people on the inside perceive it, its actions and track record do the talking.

Stadia was a classic reason I couldn't trust GCP or any Google product aside from Gmail cause I've been using it so long, because unlike you I'm NOT in the know, I just see a bunch of stuff spun out, hyped (calling it 'little stuff' is a highly subjective assertion) and axed without warning. And I won't mention what an absolute mess the android development journey has been, a related symptom of a haphazard, disorganized product strategy. These things are uniquely Google, and it's a terrible look.

Agree, nobody cares. But it was pointed out in response to a suggestion it's revisionist to say it was an experiment. It was correct (ie it was an experiment), albeit not understood by people who believe at face value what companies say.

I haven't been in the know for years, but I learned enough - don't look at what they say, look at where the money is. It's the same for almost every company.

Product strategy is a mess at most companies. The developer experience sucks for most products. Stripe built a multi-billion dollar business off of developer experience because the standard experience sucks so bad.

So we as customers need to read tea leaves in order to figure out which services Google considers "real" and which are "experiments"?

No thanks.

No, read the financials.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423...

Look at page 12.

i dont doubt gcp will continue existing. but individual services/products/apis/pricing break way too frequently, and the response from google is deal with it. small companies dont really notice it, and how anti-customer it is, but when once a month youre dealing with some firefight because gcp decided to change something its tiring, since at a big company it means tracking down ten different teams. ive not experienced anywhere near the churn in aws

Yep, it's a fair criticism.

> Will GCP be around in 5 years? I honestly am not sure.

AppEngine is going on, checks notes, 15 years now.

AppEngine today is wildly different to the App Engine I fell in love with 15 years ago.

Since you're checking notes, please check out all the AE service deprecation notes.

Disclosure: I worked for Google for ~10 years, and I fought internally many of those deprecation decisions. I did not succeed.

Google making AppEngine in the first place always felt weird to me. It was great for some web developers, but outside that use case, really not so much. But it came with a great collection of side technologies, which got unbundled (Datastore, etc) because there were folks (like me) who wanted to use the side tech but not AE itself (for many, many years you couldn't "import numpy" but people would still say "see? We have a cloud, it's called AppEngine").

Once enough things were unbundled from AE, and containers became popular, it wasn't really clear what AE provided that wasn't better solved by more standard tech.

Often times, Google leadership simply didn't understand what its own engineers and product managers knew. People told me for years "we can't do cloud because the profit margins are too small", and now look: Google is a perenially third-place in Cloud but has committed itself so much they can't even shut it down if they want to.

No, we all just migrated the decision of using GAE to using Cloud Functions / Run / Tasks, which is fine. Those are easier for Google to scale over time, than AppEngine.

The problem with AppEngine was that they had to heavily modify the runtimes for isolation... the JVM needed to be secured and that meant maintaining a separate fork, which also meant being perpetually always behind in versions. It also meant any upgrade had to go through a huge security evaluation.

So, moving to another process model, containers, worked much better.

> AppEngine today is wildly different to the App Engine I fell in love with 15 years ago.

I see that as a good thing, it means they are still working on it.

Have you actually been using it for 15 years?

My guess is not, or you would have a different opinion. But that's just a guess

Poor comment and poor guess.

My best friend Jeff started working on Objectify in 2009 after I convinced him to use GAE. I have built two businesses on it. One did $80m in revenue in the first year and I guarantee we couldn’t have done it without GAE.

Now give me back my downvote please.

Wait, you just said in a separate comment that you migrated away from App Engine.

You also just said that you used it very effectively back when it was a different thing.

I think we agree in many more ways than we disagree.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020604

Ugh, now you're making me explain myself due to your poor understanding of what I was saying and taking different comments in different threads out of context.

"We migrated"... meaning that over time, everyone is migrating from the concept of using GAE as a first choice, to using things like Run/Functions. Not that I actually physically took code for GAE and moved it to R/F. For example, my last project, I choose to use GCF, instead of GAE. The reason I went straight to GCF is because it is effectively what GAE has morphed into today. This isn't a slight on GAE at all. I've updated previous comment to hopefully clarify this for you.

Again, I have used GCP extensively since about 2009. By the way, much of what you use today was a result of things I did back when I co-founded the Jakarta Apache project, open sourced Tomcat from Sun, brought Lucene under the umbrella, blah blah blah... I've been around the internet since 1991.

backwards compatibility is a big deal in infrastructure. when a serious provider has bold new ideas, you release appengine2.

A better question is whether it’ll have improved or had price increases. GCP has had a bunch of increases lately, and you never know what will be next so you always have to guess at whether you’ll regret locking yourself more to a proprietary service.

A good friend just migrated off of GCS to R2. Hard to compete with what is essentially free.

I generally prefer AWS except for the good experience I've had with cloud run, but GCP getting shut down is not something I would worry about. These cloud services are highly profitable

Yes, especially around Looker. It's so strange/non-cloud. The 0-users 0-usage price is $5,000 per month.

Considering their earnings today being down in cloud I think I would rightfully worry about their long term commitment.

GCP revenue is up 28% YoY, and it went from a $440M quarterly loss in 2022 Q3 to a $266M profit 2023 Q3. Who'd shut down a business like that?

Lol. You're new around here?

Google has closed time after time things that were profitable and/or loved by their customer. At this point I don't see how anyone would be willing to bet the farm on anything Google