[mshron]

Agreed that Docs, Drive, GSuite are all a real enterprise businesses

YouTube though is video ads, and Maps is local ads. I think that reinforces the author's point.

(Open source projects like Tensorflow, Flutter, K8s are nice spin-offs but they're not going to command the same amount of attention or resources as revenue-generating products.)

[hpcjoe]

I'd add to that, from a recollection when my old company signed up for Gsuite many moons ago, you give them the right to use your emails, documents, etc. to help them train their models. Which is all about improving their actual product.

Maps knows where you are and where you (regularly) travel. I get email updates from Google on this. Drive enables you to work on documents and files, and provides this implicit access to google to provide them training data (unless they changed that clause of the user agreement).

While Gsuite is an "enterprise" product, that you pay for (and I did, for years), getting "support" out of google was damn near impossible. This seems to be a common theme with them. They stand something up, put up FAQ pages which don't cover what you run into, don't have a human you can contact, or a site you can email, or a ticket system you can report a problem into ... and leave you to figure out workarounds on your own.

And, should your data masters decide that you are a bad company in any way, shape, or form, you can be completely removed from (all) their platform(s), with absolutely no recourse.

Put another way, it is a huuuuuge risk to use them for anything in the critical business services path. FWIW, Microsoft seems to know how to sell/support services. Doesn't matter if their stuff is inferior in many regards, you can reach them if you have a problem. Though, quite likely, they can pull the plug on you quickly as well. But they are far more business friendly than google.