After the Hangouts/Allo/Duo debacle, I've done exactly this. I'll never put time into a new Google product again. My projects don't use G Suites or Cloud, either.
G Suite and Google Cloud are very different. GSuite is the enterprise version of the consumer apps which have billions of users so it's not going anywhere. Google Cloud has potential to meet or exceed adtech revenue and has some very big commercial customers.
It's these smaller apps that suffer because $400/month isn't enough to make a difference at Google scale. They do have a mandate to keep innovating but it's a strange cycle where the company produces some great software and then abandons it due to lack of success, because it's already too successful.
> G Suite and Google Cloud are very different. GSuite is the enterprise version of the consumer apps which have billions of users so it's not going anywhere.
It integrate into G-Suite but Hire is a separate application with its own subscription. I think it's clear that the G-Suite core services (email, calendar, productivity) are not going to be shutdown.
But since I started to use GCP 2012 a number of services has been left to die by abandonement.
Most of the times you get a clear migration path to a new service, but sometimes you dont such as when they kill the devserver for appengine standard in go 1.12 without giving a proper migration strategy. Everyone I know dread when they decide to deprecate go 1.11 support.
Same here, for me the cracking point was a combination of horror stories about peoples autobanned from the whole google ecosystem (including a whole life of gmail, company infra on google cloud, everything!) and the constant discontinuation of products
Agreed. Not only might your investment into a platform be lost, but there is a tail risk somewhere out there that if you hack something together and they decide they don't like it, it might actually hurt you. I'm not convinced that this would be more likely using an obscure service, but my intuition is that would be - since any bad press for them is instantly not worth it.
So, I don't use G Suite. I just have the free consumer Hangouts (without Gmail; deleted that a long time ago .. which after the G+ shutdown, means I can no longer search contact .. weird).
So for regular old consumer Hangouts (formerly part of G+) is that going away too? What happens to the phone number I have attached to it. .. I feel like I should port that way from Google sooner rather than later.
It's these smaller apps that suffer because $400/month isn't enough to make a difference at Google scale. They do have a mandate to keep innovating but it's a strange cycle where the company produces some great software and then abandons it due to lack of success, because it's already too successful.