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With Cloud, as long as you don't mind solving the same problem multiple times every few years when things you depend on go obsolete, indeed it is a nice experience. A lot of people do mind. I won't belabor the point; Steve Yegge said it better[0]. I think some progress has been made on this front, particularly with bigger customers; but even if Google promised decades of backward compatibility tomorrow, Google's reputation would remain its own worst enemy. Search deterioration has a much longer history than ChatGPT, but nice try. Search is an arms race against a functionally infinite tidal wave of spam, much of which is overwhelming websites beyond Google's control that historically populated Google's top search results. Epistemology is hard, the threshold for financially profitable spam is low, and the cost of sophisticated spam is getting exponentially smaller. And the long-term market solution might be someone like OpenAI thoroughly leap-frogging Google's capabilities. This is a bigger risk than you're making it out to be. As far as privacy... Google makes an attempt to follow applicable laws, and in many cases succeeds, but it still ends up constantly trolled by regulators for money or clout. Even setting aside fines-as-taxes and legislative opprobrium, I still don't think "our panopticon strips you of way less dignity than our competitor's" is something to brag about. If you believe the nature and incentive structure of the panopticon is diabolical, businesses that function as panopticons are fundamentally untrustworthy. It doesn't stop me from using Google products and services, but in a "least bad" sense - I'm happy to switch search, email, phone OS, whatever, provided someone can make a more compelling product. I think a lot of people feel similarly. I could argue that Google's open source contributions are largely market suppression tactics to keep the web innovating in a direction that protect's Google's core revenue. This isn't comprehensively a bad thing, as technologies like Chromium and Android are useful. But "our OSS suppresses markets more effectively than our competitors" isn't something to brag about, and combined with those regulatory trolls above, I see this as a big risk factor. All else aside, Google (and for that matter, most of Big Tech) fundamentally relies on massive volumes of hardware manufactured in Taiwan. This isn't even a black swan, it's a sword of Damocles over the entire industry. [0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... |