[yoodenvranx]

> Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only a couple million users, mostly pointy-headed techie types, that doesn’t drive business to any money-making effort,

And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled.

But what those direct metrics do not show is the long term trust which is destroyed by such short-term behavior.

Google has proved again and again that they are not a reliable company and because of this I will never ever spend any money on any of their products (apart from a cheap android phone every 3 years).

Why should I pay for Google Drive? Why should I pay for Youtube Red (or whatever its called nowadays)? Why should I buy a Chromebook? If I start rely on them they will be canceled after a year.

They might have saved a few million dollar by axing Google Reader but they lost _me_ as a customer forever.

[user5994461]

> And this is exactly the problem about Google! They only care about direct metrics: Product A generates only x million $ per year -> it must be canceled.

Microsoft doesn't consider a product unless it can generate more than $100M a year.

It's a general mode of operation for big companies, not limited to Google.

[munk-a]

Uh, but Microsoft is more conservative in both launching and canceling products. If MSFT said "Access can now do all the things that spreadsheets were used for so we're dropping Excel" the streets would be aflame with the protests of millions.

I also think this is a place where MSFT's application first (not app) development strategy shines. There are still folks out there running Excel98 and you can feel free to try and pry it out of their cold uncaring hands, they will fight you for it.

Don't launch and offer BS you're not going to support!

[scarface74]

How much money do you think AWS loses still supporting old deprecated services like running EC2 instances outside of a VPC and SimpleDB?

I’m not aware of a single feature on AWS that has ever been abandoned.

[derefr]

I don't think they lose any money at all. They pass the entirety of those costs onto customers.

That's why, for example, newer EC2 instance types cost less than older ones: whenever they decide to cut their margins to increase volume, they essentially do it across-the-board first, and then they back up and increase the costs for the legacy instances to reflect their increasing support burden. (It just happens to look like the legacy instances hovering at a static pricing while the modern instances get cheaper.)

Also keep in mind that when you're selling B2B SaaS, legacy services are mostly kept around because there are big enterprise accounts that pay to keep them around. If there are only three customers left on non-VPC deployments, but one of those customers is IBM, you're not going to pull the plug.

[scarface74]

I don't think they lose any money at all. They pass the entirety of those costs onto customers.

If that’s the case, that’s a business model I’m all for. Charge people enough money to make your product sustainable instead of just trying to gain a lot of users and hope you will figure it out later. Of course even then you have to have enough scale to cover the fix costs and offer it a price to make it affordable, but don’t start off thinking the answer to everything is advertising.

[user5994461]

I don't know of any service that was dropped on either of AWS or GCP. Features are dropped though, they can't be ordered from new accounts then they disappear eventually.

I don't think that you can order older instances, or run instances outside of a VPC, not sure if non-HVM AMI are still supported.

AWS has a strategy of leaving offerings to rot and making a new thing that you have to migrate to yourself. For example, the 3 different types of reserved instances or ELB vs ALB. It has its pros and cons. Google has less products that are more capable and feature complete.

They are both rather new and creating new products instead of removing products, it will take one more decade to see how they handle depreciation of core products, when any actually gets retired.

[scarface74]

You can't run EC2 instances outside of a VPC if you have a new account. If you have a very old account you still can and every now and then they announce a new feature that works with them.

[wvenable]

Yet, for some reason Microsoft keeps updating calculator and notepad in Windows.

[munk-a]

Really? I'm on windows 10 and I couldn't tell you what they've changed in notepad - did they fix legacy mac EOL support (i.e. `\r`)?

[wvenable]

Yes, they did fix the line-endings for both Mac and Unix files.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563704/microsoft-window...

[munk-a]

Oh, well that's nice and helpful. Good for them!

It probably adds almost no value to the product they're selling (nobody is buying windows for notepad, and anyone with serious notepadding to do gets a real editor) but it's a nice thing to do.

[int_19h]

How much direct revenue does WSL generate? Or VSCode?