[hg35h4]

AWS was similar for years. Huge losses, now they are profitable.

The big difference with Google Cloud is that they have a long history of jacking up pricing at random. Wake up one morning and find that the solution you just spent months building will bankrupt your business under the new pricing regime.

[woofie11]

The big difference was that AWS left behind a trail of vocal, satisfied customers.

Google has left behind a trail of de-platformed, de-monetized, (as you pointed out) re-priced, discontinued, API-changed, and otherwise angry customers.

Genuine brand value -- having customers trust you -- counts for a lot. AWS started in the red and quickly moved into the black. I was very skeptical the first time I used AWS, since the whole concept was new. I was converted after a few weeks of it working really well. I stayed converted with now a decade of it still working really well, of having good customer service, and of having 99.[many nines] uptime.

Google Cloud went the opposite way. Google started with all the developer good-will in the world, and I really wanted it to succeed. After a half-dozen serious failures, I won't touch it. I know dozens of developers who will never use Google Cloud again.

I'm not sure how Google will dig itself out of that one. At this point, it feels like it's throwing bad money after good.

[thomascgalvin]

Google has a terrible reputation for everything aside from search and email. People now expect them to cancel, abandone, or otherwise fuck up any product they announce.

The news about their Stadia team being disbanded wasn't even a surprise; it felt like an inevitability.

Even from a simple CYA perspective, I could never recommend my customers build their product on top of a Google platform.

[petercooper]

People now expect them to cancel, abandone, or otherwise fuck up any product they announce.

Certainly true for me. They could release the most amazing new thing tomorrow and I'd wait 6 months to see if it's actually going to go anywhere. That's branding and their brand, while not bad, is certainly not "dependable."

[ac29]

How many services with >$10B in revenue/yr have been closed by Google?

[woofie11]

Well, the only ones it's had with >$10b revenue historically are advertising, and literally like two or three products. You can't generalize from a small n. But there are plenty of horror stories of being deplatformed by Google advertising too.

Those make money. There's a limited time window during which Google Cloud can bleed money. If that runs out before it's profitable, businesses on it can say "bye bye," face bitrot, or see huge markups due to lock-in.

[hn_throwaway_99]

FWIW, I have a lot of familiarity and usage with both AWS and GCP, and at present I am a very satisfied GCP customer, and I've seen marked improvement with how they manage their offerings over the past 2 years.

[woofie11]

And I just got f-ed by the Google Cloud team this morning, albeit their Workspace division and not GCP.

I have a GSuite legacy account for my personal domain name. Most of my family is on it. It was free.

I just tried to set up Google Voice on one of the accounts. I learned that they silently disabled setting up new phone numbers in 2019.

And on my main account, long distance calling stopped working about a month ago. No notice, no nothing.

It's been gradually bit-rotting for years, but this is kinda a big deal. My kids can't get phone numbers associated with their main Google account because I set it up when Google was supporting personal domains? That's obnoxious.

Support goes nowhere, naturally. Google says "Use workspace support." Workspace says "Upgrade to have support."

And obviously, pricing is prohibitive given that this is now a B2B offering, and my whole family is on the domain. Cousins, aunties, and all. $6/user/month gets super-expensive super-fast.

Stuff like this means Google loses millions of dollars of business elsewhere. I keep swiping my credit card for Amazon, as does my company.

[hg35h4]

> I have a GSuite legacy account for my personal domain name. Most of my family is on it. It was free.

Oh boy they've been really trying to push people off GSuite legacy hard. I started missing incoming emails, testing would show a server error about a high email flow for maybe a dozen per day. Zero support, and they erased my posts on their support board. You can't change the primary domain as free, you can't use any email diag tools, you can't do anything.

I ended up moving to Zoho. Sure it's not free, but it's not outrageous for personal/family use. Decent migration tools as well. It really started a hard de-Googlification. I nix any chatter about using Google at work now as well.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I certainly do fault Google for what they're doing (especially the "long distance calling stopped working about a month ago. No notice, no nothing." part).

At the same time, free services is part of the problem, and I'm glad Google is shutting some of this stuff down. If anything, I think Google's biggest issue in the enterprise has been they just haven't had the corporate DNA to do enterprise-level support well for paying customers. IMO they've improved in that regard in the past couple years.

[woofie11]

To be clear, that's just what happened this morning, between posts. Google has a looooooong history of this stuff, including with paid accounts, services, and partnership worth millions to Google. Just last month, Google f---d me as a developer integrating through Google APIs.

Free service culture is part of the problem, but it's not quite as simple as stopping free service. Google can't drop shut down the free stuff without losing most of their revenue. Most of Google's business is collecting my data through search and otherwise and serving me ads. In Google's main business, customers are statistics. If you're not paying, you're the product. I'm worth a few pennies to Google advertisers, so if I cost Google more than that, they can drop me. That culture creeps into enterprise. Stir in the classic Google arrogance and the new Google incompetence, and bad things happen a lot.

In the case of GSuite, keeping these things running and working would be almost free. Many of us signed up since it meant being able to use out own domain name, not for any business purpose. Google is being deliberately mean to GSuite Legacy customers to try to pressure us to upgrade, since that's the intersection of their classic culture ("We don't care about individual customers"), enterprise thinking ("We want to charge people"), and general apathy+arrogance ("We know better than our customers").

The result is what you saw above: when people do leave, they're fed up enough with Google they won't use it for anything. The lesson is clear: You can't trust Google with anything important. De-Googlify. If I didn't have elderly relatives who know how to use GSuite and probably won't learn anything else, I'd be gone in a second.

I've cost Google millions of dollars of business at my current company alone. Whenever people even think of using Google, I walk them through a dozen similar failures in both B2B and B2C settings, and showed them the dumpster fires that resulted. I've never seen anyone go with Google after that. That's not to mention the first time I used Google Cloud, when Google cost itself millions.

[gryz]

Is there a list of examples of what they did? Or something alike to learn more about this.

[desiarnezjr]

Not only that, but Amazon has the discipline for a very long-term execution. To this day, many of the vertical categories on Amazon are very low margin or make little fiscal sense. But long-term they will probably win or make a big dent in those niches.

[ec109685]

AWS didn’t suffer huge losses for years. In fact it was “hugely profitable”: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/9/6/amazons-pro...

[hn_throwaway_99]

Your linked article doesn't show that, at all. AWS as we know it today essentially had its first public release in 2006 with EC2 and S3, which means it existed for 7 years before your article even breaks out profit for AWS in 2013.

[ec109685]

But is there anything to support the huge losses angle?

[psds2]

It's hard to compare apples to apples here because AWS leverages infrastructure Amazon already had to keep around for seasonal surges to its core business. I do not believe that Google has excess capacity for seasonal demand.

[jakupovic]

This was the story given to public. The reality was that all of the infrastructure for AWS was brand new purpose built for AWS. There was no sharing between the stacks. Source worked there in the early days. The story sold was that Amazon was utilizing spare capacity from retail side, completely wrong.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Thanks for your post. That origin myth never made sense to me in the first place: "OK, so during the holidays when retail needs that spike in capacity again, where do the AWS customers go? Oh yeah, and a lot of those customers also have the same seasonality patterns as Amazon retail."

[acct776]

The hardware was? Or the software? Both?

From their historical prices, I find it difficult to believe they're not dogfooding.

[jakupovic]

Everything was purpose built for AWS. Retail was just coming onto AWS side around 2011/2.