> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that is how you treat people. The enterprise cloud gravy train is right there and Google is standing on the tracks begging to get hit by the train.
If you've been around a while you know that at any business critical scale at all you establish a relationship with your cloud provider and get an account manager. When you do this, you have a number to call.
A billion dollar startup not doing this is a keen lesson for the CTO.
Yes, Google likely screwed up here, but being unprepared for account problems, having no established relationship with your provider is a critical mistake.
The article goes on to talk about Hetzner as an example: their pricing is great for individuals but they literally don't even offer account management relationships - even at scale they actively refuse them. There are equivalent stories of account terminations with Hetzner, which is also a key point: this isn't just a big business problem, at all.
Our team at work uses all three major public clouds and our Google Account Team is by far the worst of the three. Nothing like having to explain the same problem I’m having from the start again on every monthly cadence call because they don’t note anything or try to help resolve it
As a former Googler this doesn’t surprise me at all. Dealing with customers directly is literally seen as failure. Everything at Google is about scale, and automation. If you have to do something manually - anything - then you’re doing it wrong. It’s deep in the culture, or was when I was there. Maybe they’ve gotten better, but no signs this is true.
I had the same experience with AWS. They even assigned principal someone to our case and guy sent us old blogposts and did nothing. I took a month to find "hidden" checkbox. On GCP I always escalate to pass indian support as they are super incompetent.
(I'll take the charitable read and assume you meant an implied poorly trained, low cost Indian support as the descriptor)
Google does and always has treated support as a cost center, rather than a feature or profit center.
This worked for them in the early days and for specific products like Search -- design it well enough and you don't need support*.
Unfortunately, this fails for most other products (and especially all enterprise products) because the magnitude of impacts to a single customer (business instead of user) are so much greater.
F.ex. every conversation I was on with a GCP product team had a weird "Oh, you don't know how anyone who pays for GCP uses it, because you get it for free internally?" flavor.
* Leaving aside the "there's an entire SEO industry to 'support' Search" thing
Microsoft. It more than compensated for Azure not being the best product . They are incredibly more responsive, you have multiple points of contacts and escalation chain of actual humans you can meet
they will even come to your customer call or connect with their rep already working with the mutual customer and so on.
AWS has the best tech and but not as good as Microsoft service wise, they certainly improved a lot last few years and it shows but because they don’t have any enterprise apps like MS their footprint is more limited.
Google keeps talking about GCP being important but doesn’t feel anything has changed on ground
My company also used all 3 (at a very large scale / spends). MS was nice, but useless / incompetent technically. Anything non-trivial took forever to get a straight answer or resolve. We rarely got to speak directly to anyone with real expertise.
AWS, we could speak directly to Sr engineers on the relevant team. Full transparency, highly responsive. They were clearly trying to understand our issues and suggest change for both us and themselves.
Google was mostly useless. There was one team I got to talk directly to, who were great. But that was the exception.
My experience with AWS hasn't been good when we had major problems in redshift becoming unresponsive. Since it was an intermitent issue and not a full blown blackout they just shrugged and we kept having problems for months.
I can confirm. Redshift support is mediocre even for a F100 firm with TAM support if the workload is large and complex and you have some needle in the haystack causing problems like you allude to.
Practically speaking keeping an eye on locks and transactions is a good idea, as is watching out for your statistics on key core columns going bad when they shouldn't. (analyze and vacuum sometimes don't actually do anything when you need them to...)
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle. -Bryan Cantrill
A few years back someone at work stuck their hand in the lawnmower. I've seen this happen a few times, but that time it ended with Oracle fining us for every VirtualBox install and the company sent The IT Spanish Inquisition around to make sure we all deleted it off our computers. Fun times.
You honestly just have to treat any Oracle product as malware, and proactively scan for it / block it from being installed on employee laptops in the first place.
The article is incorrect and misleading. Railway did have an account manager and they did call them and they did pick up the phone and work with them to restore service.
An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation.
I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation, one day we woke up and we simply did not have control of our website for a full week. There was nothing wrong with our payment method, there was no reason the payment shouldn’t have happened, it was completely their fault. They found out because we called them in a panic. This was a major company. We left them a week later and our CEO talks about it constantly as a horror story to other companies and there is no way our situation was unique.
It’s not just about the value of the contract. This whole situation has been in the news for days now. It’s terrible PR and I guarantee you it is costing them business in the long run. All I have seen for days is people talking about how poor Google’s support is, and I’m not even somebody who makes those decisions.
I get it, “Google is too big to fail.” But eventually, that stops being true
Typically a strong account team builds processes with other teams (compliance, engineering, etc) that enshrines and insulates important accounts from accidents like this.
In this case, I'd expect major accounts (and maybe Railway isn't above this level?) to be in a protected tier that is immune from automated suspensions like this.
If suspicious traffic occurs that _would_ trigger a suspension like that, the account team would be paged. Because this may mean your important account was compromised, shipped a bug, has been hit by something and you should immediately start working _with_ them to figure it out.
Fairly basic for a company with any customer management motion at all.
Then they’re not doing their job OR Google has bad systems in place that make it so their account managers aren’t equipped to do their job. Neither is a good look!
in my experience hetzner does have that. my VP of infra had regular contact with them, was quite important actually because we had scaling needs they couldn't deliver on and we had timelines. hetzner still has issues getting enough intel servers on it seems
Railway had dedicated reps and everything. Even the number of the head. One of their railway company leads said so on X or their Discord during the outage.
They paid for everything you can pay for to get Google on the horn and ready because they are not a tiny company. Yet it was still terrible.
Spot on. This is the wrong takeaway. The account manager can't do anything to prevent the problem. They can only escalate, and that's what they did.
The right takeaway is you should not use Google Cloud because Google itself doesn't use Google Cloud for anything critical. I don't know how many times I've said this, but it clearly hasn't sunk in. A Googler once responded, "Well ackshually, Google Domains is built on Google Cloud." Google Domains isn't mission critical and has since been sold to Squarespace.
Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. How many DAUs would stadia or hangouts or even reader have today?
This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object.
Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.
Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially than Facebook now.
I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it.
I thought the “circles” idea made total sense and it could have been a good social network, if they had let it do that instead of forcing it into every other part of Google.
Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.
The leadership was never completely honest about why Reader was shutdown, and the stated reasons didn't pass some basic sniff checks. But it was easy to read between the lines: the executives' attention was on other things, and Reader was a threat to their growth. But also it was a passion project that a company like Google would struggle to keep updating since it brought in little revenue (even though there were hordes of people volunteering to maintain it for free in their 20% time).
The decline of RSS among a certain audience was only peripherally related to the elimination of Reader; it's not like there aren't other RSS readers out there even if Google makes a convenient villain. But Google did whiff on social in general and certainly indexing the world's information became a very secondary goal especially after failing with some efforts on the copyright front.
Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.
I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs.
But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating.
I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then.
They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.
It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.
Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money.
I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.
The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial.
It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations).
Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue.
Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.
Yes, but this is exactly my point. You can't perfectly calculate exactly how much revenue is lost due to breaking trust with users because you repeatedly sunset projects that they've relied on.
Maybe if Google had those support engineers on Google+ for 5 years generating $X, that would've created enough trust that Gemini could now generate $4X.
> People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that.
Not true in the slightest. Google has had some quality hardware products where they killed the cloud service and rendered them useless. Products that were stable and working, but Google decided to pull the plug and make the hardware worthless.
Quality of the product means nothing. You’re at the mercy of the whims of Google’s decision making. The thing you like may stop working in a couple months.
Unfortunately quality and earning money are only loosely correlated - especially for Google when they can pour money into making something good, but baby necessarily figure out how to make it earn.
And it also seems if it's not a $100 m+ business they lose interest very quickly. So even good things that could run somewhat cheap of optimized end up with no long term place in the Google ecosystem when they fail to make it big.
... That all said Google kills perfectly good things because they have a few internal rules that encourage it: that there can only be one of a system (dunno if that's applies to product but they seem to always want to consolidate every few years) and that stuff cannot be unowned so reorgs => kill products that don't match the new org structure. That and they incentivize pumping out new products with their promotion process - whether or not they really needed yet another chat/vc/etc product, someone probably figured they could climb the career ladder by shipping another one.
> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. ... you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't
Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community.
No one cares when they kill something niche.
I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic.
And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.
If anything, email is the #1 priority for de-googling, lest they slop you with a ban. Losing access to your email is so disruptive that migrating to a more trustworthy provider with custom domain support is worth the time and effort of updating addresses.
Most people would argue that Stadia would have many. Many people loved Google Reader. There are numerous examples of things that were great and were killed, because they hadn't monetized enough or "fast enough", and when you are chasing results on a quarterly basis, you can't always get things that will generate tremendous value with more time.
I think the complaint about Google specifically is that they seem to do these things and commit to what seem to be whole lines of business without an actual business plan to make it viable.
It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.
It's interesting to imagine if there's some kind of middle ground where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent? I suspect at least some of people's frustration is that X or Y was pitched as something serious, which then grates some when it gets canceled.
But maybe you can't launch a product without pretending it's going to be real because it'll be dead on arrival?
> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints
Exactly. I mean, you can argue forever about the stuff that got killed. But you know what didn't get killed? All the stuff they're turning into $4.6T of market cap.
In particular, they didn't kill AI. They're the only pre-AI tech giant with a successful frontier LLM, everyone else failed (Meta) or missed the boat (Apple, Microsoft[1]). They're the only tech giant[2] to produce working in-house datacenter AI hardware.
Making a lot of bets means that you make a lot of bad bets too. But Google has made a lot of good bets.
[1] Though MS got near-exclusive access to OpenAI via a very expensive late investment, which sorta counts.
[2] NVIDIA is giant now, they certainly weren't when these bets were being placed.
I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death.
Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success.
Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions.
CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.
> you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't.
They killed their chat app. Then had their pants on fire after Discord became the thing. The same can happen with any app they killed. So no, that's not 'taking risks'. Taking risks is shutting down perfectly working apps that can suddenly become 'the new thing'.
Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products.
If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.
Waymo was originally called the Google self-driving car. If it's only come to your city this year, I'd say that's pretty new. If it's not in your city yet, it's so new it's not even there!
Is it any sort of leap over the product's it's copying?
IBM made some decent (sometimes extremely good, even!) products in a lot of segments for a long time after losing their relevance as "driving the future of computing." But rarely as a segment-definer or introducer.
You're entitled to your opinion, but you're literally the first person I've ever heard say that. Even people who like LLMs seem to think that GPT and Claude are the good ones, with Gemini being B tier at best.
#6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption.
I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.
But it still great today, no? I mean professionally I am in the MS 365 world, which is definitely not better than gmail. We have some mail servers for services and until now we weren't able (for instance) to find an open source alternative to gmail and office 365.. any recommendation?
Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but they don't have the advertising reach.
Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.
> Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.
I think comparing them to IBM is reasonable, just maybe not... today's IBM.
IBM was an absolute hardware and software behemoth leading up to the PC / early Internet era, after which they pivoted from making groundbreaking real things to providing "enterprise support."
They also outlasted almost all of their contemporaries with that pivot, for better or worse.
IBM got to where it is today by being complacent and not keeping up with innovation. Google is notably at the forefront of innovation, in a driving seat, and that innovation directly stands to benefit one of their core businesses in a way that the market is probably only just beginning to understand. It's an entirely different situation, imo.
A technology company that's profitably doing over $50 billion in sales after more than 100 years with no obvious signs of impending doom sounds like an okay position to me, even if the tables have turned since 1984[1].
The context here is that at one point, IBM was an innovator and global leader in the technology space before it got outcompeted. It was the first company to cross a $100 billion market cap. If you think of the IBM of 50 years ago as being roughly analogous to Apple today, the difference is pretty clear. Google is much closer to Apple than it is to IBM, and I don't see that changing.
I am sure I am not alone in observing that starting around 2020... may be even a few years earlier... Google seemed to hire a lot of middle managers. I personally knew several managers who did not seem to contribute much beyond "organizing" meetings, and I saw them all join Google one by one.
It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline.
How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives.
I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.
Recommending Hetzner as an alternative here is a mistake. It just exposes you to a different problem.
There is a reason for the term "Hetznered" existing. Hetzner can suddenly and permanently terminates your account. They do this without warning or explanation. When it happens, you lose access to all your servers and your backups.
If you search HN, you will find plenty of examples. People lose everything within 24 hours and have no recourse.
Hetzner is amazing for pricing. But the only safe way to use them is if your infrastructure is cloud agnostic. If you are not locked in and can move between providers quickly, it is a very cost effective place to run stateless services like DNS.
> Eric Schmidt got booed on stage recently. Eric Schmidt! The guy who basically was Google for a decade. When your own alumni get heckled by the crowd your brand isn't just damaged. It's toxic.
I was at an MIT event 8 years ago where Eric Schmidt was booed. It was his first summer at MIT. Basically everything he said about Google and his world view left the students feeling horrified. It was so bad people walked out in a daze.
Google has amazing potential but has consistently squandered it. Gemini CLI being killed/rebranded is yet another example of their complete lack of follow through and persistence. It wasn't a good product - it was slow, buggy, and unreliable but you have to fix it to demonstrate you can do more than launch and then kill products.
They have everything going for them - amazing technology and technologists, huge distribution and lock-in, and a giant compute advantage and the can pay for more out of cash flow rather than debt or equity. And yet it's still hard to see them not fumbling the ball.
Google is the opposite of IBM. IBM would send 10 consultants to coddle you while extracting all your money. Google sends you 10 automated notifications about how your service is about to be changed or terminated and then asks for more money.
IBM also made its money off of fat enterprise contracts and vertically integrated products. Google makes its money off of being the monopoly owning most of the advertising industry, which ridiculously is still a thing despite advertising not really working.
however my last experiences with IBM was: they send you 10 junior consultants, they get the money, for 10 senior consultants, and still cannot deliver what they promised.
> People said IBM was too big to fail. It wasn't. It just became completely irrelevant slowly, then all at once.
SV people love to throw out this line, while several of the FOSS packages they use daily in the Linux ecosystem, including the kernel, are sponsored with IBM money, either directly or via Red-Hat.
I noticed it as LLM-written by the middle of the second paragraph. The text is filled with classic rhetorical structures LLMs love making, especially the "it isn't X, it's Y" and "not A, not B, not C, but D" patterns.
"Everyone hates YouTube" is an argument that has a lot to overcome. All objective indicators suggest it is incredibly popular, and growing in popularity, pretty much across the demographic board.
This is pretty common across social media as well, surveyed sentiment towards it often negative while usage is high. I suspect it's because of the addictive quality.
But sentiment toward YouTube isn't negative. It is the most reputable social media in Morning Consult's brand reputation survey. It enjoys a higher reputation score than things like Cheerios and Tylenol. I don't think you can separate the reputation of the platform from the collective impression left by the creators, and people like the creators on YouTube. And, I propose, people largely DGAF about the platform features and presentation.
I hate it, but I still use it. The platform sucks, but most of the content isn't available anywhere else. Between the infrastructure cost, the difficulty of monetization, and the immense user/create base already invested in the platform, I don't think it's possible for anyone to compete with YouTube without government intervention.
Wang, Bull, Unisys, IBM, DEC, the Mongolian Empire, the Hungarian Empire, Dutch Empire, the Portugese Empire.... they all exist in some form, but are shadows of their former selves.
IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks.
Over time, the company became synonymous with failure and mediocrity.
I honestly think we're in a post-disruption era in that Google/Meta/Twitter/Reddit/etc. can't die. They have too much power and they've captured the entire population now. The internet isn't made up largely of enthusiasts anymore. Mediocrity is the strength of these platforms. The eternal September has made their home and they're not moving again.
I think Meta, Twitter and Reddit will lose relevance as younger generations move to different social networks. TikTok has already taken a bite out of the social media market, so has Discord.
Out of the four companies listed, Google is the one whose survival I’d bet on.
People thought that about all the other megacompanies that died too. This current crop is not special. Google has just announced they'll kill search and replace it with AI - think it'll still be strong after that?
> And Search is just completely unusable now. They built an entire empire off our content. Bloggers, old forums, niche sites. We made the web worth searching in the first place. Now their AI Overviews just scrape our exact answers, strip out the hyperlinks, and repackage it in a blue box without linking back.
I don't like that they throw AI overview on your face when you search, rather they should show AI overview on the right column and search results on the left.
IBM is reinventing itself, no? From mainframe maximalists to purchasing HashiCorp, Red Hat, Confluent. All to capture enterprise for years to come. It seems as if IBM is making a comeback.
If you read their annual report they bet the farm on RedHat and Kubernetes. They spun off their legacy services business and have basically have monopoly power over the Federal government, banks and defense contractors. They have been buying out other Kubernetes vendors such as Kubecost. They are are pretty focused now, we will see how well they will do long term.
The technological world is rapidly changing and Google is changing with it. They are in a very strong position, owning the full stack in an industry that is very early and rapidly growing. They won't win all their bets but they have enough coverage for it not to matter.
I disagree with the Apple comparison. Apple haven't done anything successfully innovative for what seems like decades. I do admire their stance on AI though. Not going all in makes them unique.
Internally people feel like it's becoming IBM. Too many accountants and thinking only about money. Few things changed when AI race started but its still not enough to bring back old Google
I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?
The one point I will make though is: these people complaining about Google shutting things down is really just funny. It's like complaining about people having abandoned side projects. A healthy organization tries things. Not everything works out or is cashflow positive. That's life.
For reference Google has more employees than all Y Combinator companies combined. Keep in mind there are thousands of dead Y Combinator companies.
A better complaint about Google would be the lack of polish on many products. Take Gmail. Google made haste in adding the "AI Inbox", and yet you can't even read threaded emails in reverse chronological order. People have been complaining about this for nearly its entire existence. With the talent, and now AI - there's no reason such a thing couldn't be fixed tomorrow. It's just CSS and there are tons of chrome extensions that implement this. C'mon...
I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails) there isn't anything, say, to make really good proactive suggestions for like "apply this label to all incoming emails like this."
That sort of stagnation, though, and lack of their "trying things" really moving the needle compared to their decades-old ads product, makes me think they really are becoming the new IBM. IBM, in my estimation, has largely been irrelevant to the future of computing since the early 80s when MS ended up owning the PC story, but they have still had some quite solid stock prices runs at times over the decades (10x in five years at the end of the 90s, say). You can make a lot of money with a no-longer-that-interesting business.
I honest to God cannot see how someone informed at all could call Google stagnant. Name almost anything and Google is on the frontier. Quantum computing, self driving, language models, network infrastructure, TPUs, etc.
It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.
Nah, they're right. Google can only afford to do this because there are literally two players when it comes to online advertising. Remove advertising from Google and suddenly they can't subsidize failing BUs.
Kinda the point of preventing monopolies. They stagnate actual growth in the pursuit of profits. Americans don't benefit when Google is a trillion dollar company, but Americans would benefit if there was an actual competitive market.
Sure, and 20 years ago Walmart dominated retail. And yet, Amazon is winning now. Being #1 is never guaranteed. Plenty of more examples of this happening. Defending your position becomes increasingly difficult. We're literally seeing this right now with AI.
For self-driving, Waymo isn't technically Google anymore. ;)
I don't know anything about Quantum so I'll defer to you on that one.
In the LLMs/inference/ML space they seem to be great at theory and poor at execution until someone else shows them what the model looks like first. Similar to with cloud. Or with mobile. Or with voice assistants. Or with social (well, they never got there on that one even with the copy attempt.) Which is a classic "decline phase" behavior (see also Xerox, Bell).
If all Google products outside of their research papers and labs had disappeared ten years ago, what product categories would be missing?
What kind of sicko wants to read an email thread in reverse order? I worked on gmail for years and never heard the first whiff of this being a thing that any sane person wants.
I would be willing to allow that there are probably some highly vocal people conditioned by OWA trauma who might have demanded this, but by no means a grassroots army.
is it really that weird to want to read the most recent email first? that's how the emails are already arranged. they just decide to not respect this when reading threaded emails. or is this sarcasm? lol
> I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. [...] I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?
Can't you even consider the possibility that the reader shutdown and the death of RSS might be causally related?
I tried to test an ad in the meta ad platform… and it is insanely terrible. Teams don’t care about B2B software even if it drives the business or there aren’t viable competitors.
While Apple does make nice hardware and appear to be listening to their users in that respect, don't forget that Tahoe has not been particularly well-received.
>YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. (...) I was a hardcore Android guy because it felt open. Sideloading, choice, freedom. (...) that toxicity doesn't show up on quarterly earnings yet. But it hollows you out from the inside. Word of mouth dies. The cult following evaporates.
It's despiriting when even anti enshittification blog posts bear all the style of AI created slop.
> YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too
One thing that I really really hate Youtube for is that they don't allow users to turn off their shorts. You can choose to "reduce" Shorts for a given session, but they come back right next time.
That said, Youtube is tremendously valuable for its high-quality content. It's kinda like a restaurant. The service can be horrible. They decor can be hideous. But! I'm going back as long as the food is delicious.
You can go to Google Account > Data & Privacy. Then pause Youtube History. There will be no more feed on Youtube home screen. You will only see your /subscriptions feed. Little trick for a more peaceful life.
There's a new setting rolling out in the YouTube app.
Go to settings > time management > shorts feed limit. Turn that setting on, and you can select how many minutes you limit to. There's now an option for "0 minutes".
On IOS/macos there's an app called "Unwatched for YouTube" which allows you to subscribe to channels via RSS (no need to login) and then you can turn shorts on/off per channel.
It's free for now but the developer has plans for some kind of subscription for premium features.
Yeah the 'not being able to turn off shorts' is such a brazen, anti-user form of enshitification. Alongside not being able to hide threads in Instragram (can only hide for 30 days), and so many other examples. Like there is enough demand for this that there are literally browser extensions to block shorts.
I can see why youtube don't want you to disable; because shorts are "addictive" in a certain moorish way and letting you disable would lesson your expected youtube use time.
But it's such a wierd choice on a certain level right. Like "lets make our product objectively worse for users because (in the short term?) we'll make more money". It's the sort of choice that does't really exist in the "real" "normal" economy. Like you bake some bread, you wanna make it as good as possible, I buy it from you because you make good bread.
So anyway I get why they do it. I'm just a little surprised that in their calculations the gains to engagement from forcing shorts are worth the loss of user goodwill. And even like employee morale right. Like how would you feel about your job if you're having to do this stuff, deliberately and explicitly curtailing the choices of your users.
>YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too. Everyone hates the demonetization stuff but the low effort AI slop content is what really kills it for me. YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. But if you keep kicking off the actual suppliers and replacing them with low effort garbage, literally anyone can host that garbage.
I don't see slop on youtube and nobody I know is complaining about it. My current problem is private equity buying all the channels I love!
> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that is how you treat people. The enterprise cloud gravy train is right there and Google is standing on the tracks begging to get hit by the train.
If you've been around a while you know that at any business critical scale at all you establish a relationship with your cloud provider and get an account manager. When you do this, you have a number to call.
A billion dollar startup not doing this is a keen lesson for the CTO.
Yes, Google likely screwed up here, but being unprepared for account problems, having no established relationship with your provider is a critical mistake.
The article goes on to talk about Hetzner as an example: their pricing is great for individuals but they literally don't even offer account management relationships - even at scale they actively refuse them. There are equivalent stories of account terminations with Hetzner, which is also a key point: this isn't just a big business problem, at all.
Our team at work uses all three major public clouds and our Google Account Team is by far the worst of the three. Nothing like having to explain the same problem I’m having from the start again on every monthly cadence call because they don’t note anything or try to help resolve it
As a former Googler this doesn’t surprise me at all. Dealing with customers directly is literally seen as failure. Everything at Google is about scale, and automation. If you have to do something manually - anything - then you’re doing it wrong. It’s deep in the culture, or was when I was there. Maybe they’ve gotten better, but no signs this is true.
I had the same experience with AWS. They even assigned principal someone to our case and guy sent us old blogposts and did nothing. I took a month to find "hidden" checkbox. On GCP I always escalate to pass indian support as they are super incompetent.
(I'll take the charitable read and assume you meant an implied poorly trained, low cost Indian support as the descriptor)
Google does and always has treated support as a cost center, rather than a feature or profit center.
This worked for them in the early days and for specific products like Search -- design it well enough and you don't need support*.
Unfortunately, this fails for most other products (and especially all enterprise products) because the magnitude of impacts to a single customer (business instead of user) are so much greater.
F.ex. every conversation I was on with a GCP product team had a weird "Oh, you don't know how anyone who pays for GCP uses it, because you get it for free internally?" flavor.
* Leaving aside the "there's an entire SEO industry to 'support' Search" thing
Who is the best? Just curious.
Microsoft. It more than compensated for Azure not being the best product . They are incredibly more responsive, you have multiple points of contacts and escalation chain of actual humans you can meet
they will even come to your customer call or connect with their rep already working with the mutual customer and so on.
AWS has the best tech and but not as good as Microsoft service wise, they certainly improved a lot last few years and it shows but because they don’t have any enterprise apps like MS their footprint is more limited.
Google keeps talking about GCP being important but doesn’t feel anything has changed on ground
My company also used all 3 (at a very large scale / spends). MS was nice, but useless / incompetent technically. Anything non-trivial took forever to get a straight answer or resolve. We rarely got to speak directly to anyone with real expertise.
AWS, we could speak directly to Sr engineers on the relevant team. Full transparency, highly responsive. They were clearly trying to understand our issues and suggest change for both us and themselves.
Google was mostly useless. There was one team I got to talk directly to, who were great. But that was the exception.
My experience with AWS hasn't been good when we had major problems in redshift becoming unresponsive. Since it was an intermitent issue and not a full blown blackout they just shrugged and we kept having problems for months.
I can confirm. Redshift support is mediocre even for a F100 firm with TAM support if the workload is large and complex and you have some needle in the haystack causing problems like you allude to.
Practically speaking keeping an eye on locks and transactions is a good idea, as is watching out for your statistics on key core columns going bad when they shouldn't. (analyze and vacuum sometimes don't actually do anything when you need them to...)
Microsoft of course
Why not Oracle
Because Oracle = Larry Ellison = The Lawnmower
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle. -Bryan Cantrill
A few years back someone at work stuck their hand in the lawnmower. I've seen this happen a few times, but that time it ended with Oracle fining us for every VirtualBox install and the company sent The IT Spanish Inquisition around to make sure we all deleted it off our computers. Fun times.
You honestly just have to treat any Oracle product as malware, and proactively scan for it / block it from being installed on employee laptops in the first place.
They also seem to keep revolving team-members so you're always explaining things all over to new people.
I would think that Railway certainly had an account manager, right? Did they say they didn’t have one?
The article is incorrect and misleading. Railway did have an account manager and they did call them and they did pick up the phone and work with them to restore service.
An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation.
I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation, one day we woke up and we simply did not have control of our website for a full week. There was nothing wrong with our payment method, there was no reason the payment shouldn’t have happened, it was completely their fault. They found out because we called them in a panic. This was a major company. We left them a week later and our CEO talks about it constantly as a horror story to other companies and there is no way our situation was unique.
It’s not just about the value of the contract. This whole situation has been in the news for days now. It’s terrible PR and I guarantee you it is costing them business in the long run. All I have seen for days is people talking about how poor Google’s support is, and I’m not even somebody who makes those decisions.
I get it, “Google is too big to fail.” But eventually, that stops being true
I'm not sure what you think account managers do that they can prevent accidents/bugs like that?
Typically a strong account team builds processes with other teams (compliance, engineering, etc) that enshrines and insulates important accounts from accidents like this.
In this case, I'd expect major accounts (and maybe Railway isn't above this level?) to be in a protected tier that is immune from automated suspensions like this.
If suspicious traffic occurs that _would_ trigger a suspension like that, the account team would be paged. Because this may mean your important account was compromised, shipped a bug, has been hit by something and you should immediately start working _with_ them to figure it out.
Fairly basic for a company with any customer management motion at all.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231538, they appeared to have everything you can have, and it wasn’t enough to prevent this.
Oh I was just describing to GP what a strong customer motion would do to protect against these things, not commenting on what Railway had or didn't.
But clearly GCP _doesn't_ have a strong customer motion or this story wouldn't have happened.
The account manager was almost surely just as blindsided as the customer.
Then they’re not doing their job OR Google has bad systems in place that make it so their account managers aren’t equipped to do their job. Neither is a good look!
What is the use of Account manager if a billion dollar company got screwedup for straight 5 + hours?
Without an account manager, you submit a ticket and no one looks at it for a few days.
With an account manager, you call this person up immediately, and they hound the devs in person or call up the devs personally.
If iam an enterprise customer, the least i expect will be a prior communication and a warning email before account termination. Is this too much?
This problem likely had nothing to do with the account manager though. I doubt it was the account manager making the call to suspend the account.
> account management relationships
in my experience hetzner does have that. my VP of infra had regular contact with them, was quite important actually because we had scaling needs they couldn't deliver on and we had timelines. hetzner still has issues getting enough intel servers on it seems
You are completely misinformed here.
Railway had dedicated reps and everything. Even the number of the head. One of their railway company leads said so on X or their Discord during the outage.
They paid for everything you can pay for to get Google on the horn and ready because they are not a tiny company. Yet it was still terrible.
Spot on. This is the wrong takeaway. The account manager can't do anything to prevent the problem. They can only escalate, and that's what they did.
The right takeaway is you should not use Google Cloud because Google itself doesn't use Google Cloud for anything critical. I don't know how many times I've said this, but it clearly hasn't sunk in. A Googler once responded, "Well ackshually, Google Domains is built on Google Cloud." Google Domains isn't mission critical and has since been sold to Squarespace.
& people wonder why Microsoft quickly gained ground in Cloud.
they know how to support businesses - small or large. better support if you're enterprise.
hell M$ can even have people at your place in an instant - not the "forward-deployed engineer" propaganda being spread around by SV these days.
Victim-blaming is not appropriate here.
Google did not "likely" screw up.
To be sure, however, this is a keen lesson for every CTO.
i was responding to the article, i hadn't bothered to read railways pm as it's not super interesting, anyway, i've read it now, here: https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-may-19-2026-gcp-a... and indeed they weren't at fault
Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. How many DAUs would stadia or hangouts or even reader have today?
This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object.
Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.
Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially than Facebook now.
I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it.
So, yes, I do complain.
I thought the “circles” idea made total sense and it could have been a good social network, if they had let it do that instead of forcing it into every other part of Google.
Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.
The leadership was never completely honest about why Reader was shutdown, and the stated reasons didn't pass some basic sniff checks. But it was easy to read between the lines: the executives' attention was on other things, and Reader was a threat to their growth. But also it was a passion project that a company like Google would struggle to keep updating since it brought in little revenue (even though there were hordes of people volunteering to maintain it for free in their 20% time).
The decline of RSS among a certain audience was only peripherally related to the elimination of Reader; it's not like there aren't other RSS readers out there even if Google makes a convenient villain. But Google did whiff on social in general and certainly indexing the world's information became a very secondary goal especially after failing with some efforts on the copyright front.
Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.
I would have said Knoll was the bigger fail on the spam front. You can't have unmoderated posting generally.
I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs.
But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating.
I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then.
They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.
It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.
Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money.
I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.
The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial.
It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations).
Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue.
Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.
Yes, but this is exactly my point. You can't perfectly calculate exactly how much revenue is lost due to breaking trust with users because you repeatedly sunset projects that they've relied on.
Maybe if Google had those support engineers on Google+ for 5 years generating $X, that would've created enough trust that Gemini could now generate $4X.
It’s also hard to estimate the lost revenue from projects which aren’t started because your staff is busy maintaining legacy projects.
Sure, but I don't think Google's primary issue is that they aren't starting enough projects.
> People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that.
Not true in the slightest. Google has had some quality hardware products where they killed the cloud service and rendered them useless. Products that were stable and working, but Google decided to pull the plug and make the hardware worthless.
Quality of the product means nothing. You’re at the mercy of the whims of Google’s decision making. The thing you like may stop working in a couple months.
Unfortunately quality and earning money are only loosely correlated - especially for Google when they can pour money into making something good, but baby necessarily figure out how to make it earn.
And it also seems if it's not a $100 m+ business they lose interest very quickly. So even good things that could run somewhat cheap of optimized end up with no long term place in the Google ecosystem when they fail to make it big.
... That all said Google kills perfectly good things because they have a few internal rules that encourage it: that there can only be one of a system (dunno if that's applies to product but they seem to always want to consolidate every few years) and that stuff cannot be unowned so reorgs => kill products that don't match the new org structure. That and they incentivize pumping out new products with their promotion process - whether or not they really needed yet another chat/vc/etc product, someone probably figured they could climb the career ladder by shipping another one.
> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. ... you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't
Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community.
No one cares when they kill something niche.
I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic.
And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.
If anything, email is the #1 priority for de-googling, lest they slop you with a ban. Losing access to your email is so disruptive that migrating to a more trustworthy provider with custom domain support is worth the time and effort of updating addresses.
Most people would argue that Stadia would have many. Many people loved Google Reader. There are numerous examples of things that were great and were killed, because they hadn't monetized enough or "fast enough", and when you are chasing results on a quarterly basis, you can't always get things that will generate tremendous value with more time.
I think the complaint about Google specifically is that they seem to do these things and commit to what seem to be whole lines of business without an actual business plan to make it viable.
It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.
I don't disagree with your point.
It's interesting to imagine if there's some kind of middle ground where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent? I suspect at least some of people's frustration is that X or Y was pitched as something serious, which then grates some when it gets canceled.
But maybe you can't launch a product without pretending it's going to be real because it'll be dead on arrival?
...where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent
Yeah, it's what Google used to do by releasing everything as "Beta". Gmail was in Beta for 5 years with millions of users.
> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints
Exactly. I mean, you can argue forever about the stuff that got killed. But you know what didn't get killed? All the stuff they're turning into $4.6T of market cap.
In particular, they didn't kill AI. They're the only pre-AI tech giant with a successful frontier LLM, everyone else failed (Meta) or missed the boat (Apple, Microsoft[1]). They're the only tech giant[2] to produce working in-house datacenter AI hardware.
Making a lot of bets means that you make a lot of bad bets too. But Google has made a lot of good bets.
[1] Though MS got near-exclusive access to OpenAI via a very expensive late investment, which sorta counts.
[2] NVIDIA is giant now, they certainly weren't when these bets were being placed.
I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death.
Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success.
Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions.
CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.
> you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't.
They killed their chat app. Then had their pants on fire after Discord became the thing. The same can happen with any app they killed. So no, that's not 'taking risks'. Taking risks is shutting down perfectly working apps that can suddenly become 'the new thing'.
Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products.
If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.
Notebook LM is good.
Waymo's pretty good.
That's not a Google product per-se, and it's also not new.
Waymo was originally called the Google self-driving car. If it's only come to your city this year, I'd say that's pretty new. If it's not in your city yet, it's so new it's not even there!
Gemini is pretty good.
Is it any sort of leap over the product's it's copying?
IBM made some decent (sometimes extremely good, even!) products in a lot of segments for a long time after losing their relevance as "driving the future of computing." But rarely as a segment-definer or introducer.
You're entitled to your opinion, but you're literally the first person I've ever heard say that. Even people who like LLMs seem to think that GPT and Claude are the good ones, with Gemini being B tier at best.
https://openrouter.ai/rankings
Uhh... It's on the 13-th place in rankings. And way behind in most benchmarks?
#6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption.
I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.
Agreed Gemini maybe not the best, but it is still pretty good. And their research was the foundation of others (Attention is all you need paper).
Gemini tends to be faster and the Flash and Flash Lite models outperform ChatGPT's equivalent models.
Isn't Gmail a product? i think its pretty solid. Actually the best e-mail service out there, no?
Gmail ruined email because it used to be decentralised, but now everyone needs to be on Gmail so Gmail won't randomly discard their messages.
wow "Gmail ruined email" is a strong argument. Hard to agree with. Gmail revolutionized and democratized email.
I would've thought the democratised era was when there were 2000 providers and not when there were 2?
Well, it was a great product in 2005!
But it still great today, no? I mean professionally I am in the MS 365 world, which is definitely not better than gmail. We have some mail servers for services and until now we weren't able (for instance) to find an open source alternative to gmail and office 365.. any recommendation?
Waymo
Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but they don't have the advertising reach.
Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.
> Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.
I think comparing them to IBM is reasonable, just maybe not... today's IBM.
IBM was an absolute hardware and software behemoth leading up to the PC / early Internet era, after which they pivoted from making groundbreaking real things to providing "enterprise support."
They also outlasted almost all of their contemporaries with that pivot, for better or worse.
And at one point, IBM was at the head of the pack with AI. Remember Deep Blue?
IBM got to where it is today by being complacent and not keeping up with innovation. Google is notably at the forefront of innovation, in a driving seat, and that innovation directly stands to benefit one of their core businesses in a way that the market is probably only just beginning to understand. It's an entirely different situation, imo.
A technology company that's profitably doing over $50 billion in sales after more than 100 years with no obvious signs of impending doom sounds like an okay position to me, even if the tables have turned since 1984[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
The context here is that at one point, IBM was an innovator and global leader in the technology space before it got outcompeted. It was the first company to cross a $100 billion market cap. If you think of the IBM of 50 years ago as being roughly analogous to Apple today, the difference is pretty clear. Google is much closer to Apple than it is to IBM, and I don't see that changing.
Remember Watson?
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Google.
Seems apropos.
For choosing Google Cloud? When was it ever conventional to choose Google Cloud?
Not really I’d not call Google the safest/most popular choice for AI or Cloud.
I am sure I am not alone in observing that starting around 2020... may be even a few years earlier... Google seemed to hire a lot of middle managers. I personally knew several managers who did not seem to contribute much beyond "organizing" meetings, and I saw them all join Google one by one.
It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline.
How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives.
I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.
Recommending Hetzner as an alternative here is a mistake. It just exposes you to a different problem.
There is a reason for the term "Hetznered" existing. Hetzner can suddenly and permanently terminates your account. They do this without warning or explanation. When it happens, you lose access to all your servers and your backups.
If you search HN, you will find plenty of examples. People lose everything within 24 hours and have no recourse.
Hetzner is amazing for pricing. But the only safe way to use them is if your infrastructure is cloud agnostic. If you are not locked in and can move between providers quickly, it is a very cost effective place to run stateless services like DNS.
> Eric Schmidt got booed on stage recently. Eric Schmidt! The guy who basically was Google for a decade. When your own alumni get heckled by the crowd your brand isn't just damaged. It's toxic.
I was at an MIT event 8 years ago where Eric Schmidt was booed. It was his first summer at MIT. Basically everything he said about Google and his world view left the students feeling horrified. It was so bad people walked out in a daze.
So if this is the bar, we passed it long ago.
I didn't know about that event. What did he say to get booed that time?
Google has amazing potential but has consistently squandered it. Gemini CLI being killed/rebranded is yet another example of their complete lack of follow through and persistence. It wasn't a good product - it was slow, buggy, and unreliable but you have to fix it to demonstrate you can do more than launch and then kill products.
They have everything going for them - amazing technology and technologists, huge distribution and lock-in, and a giant compute advantage and the can pay for more out of cash flow rather than debt or equity. And yet it's still hard to see them not fumbling the ball.
Google is the opposite of IBM. IBM would send 10 consultants to coddle you while extracting all your money. Google sends you 10 automated notifications about how your service is about to be changed or terminated and then asks for more money.
IBM also made its money off of fat enterprise contracts and vertically integrated products. Google makes its money off of being the monopoly owning most of the advertising industry, which ridiculously is still a thing despite advertising not really working.
however my last experiences with IBM was: they send you 10 junior consultants, they get the money, for 10 senior consultants, and still cannot deliver what they promised.
> People said IBM was too big to fail. It wasn't. It just became completely irrelevant slowly, then all at once.
SV people love to throw out this line, while several of the FOSS packages they use daily in the Linux ecosystem, including the kernel, are sponsored with IBM money, either directly or via Red-Hat.
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
This article is nothing more than hyperbole and opinion. Its only worth is to provide confirmation bias.
I agree with many points in the article, but there is no informative aspect to the post.
Your comment lacks any specifics. Can you elaborate?
Why's this poorly written piece on top of HN?
I rather enjoyed it. I also enjoyed reading something that did not give me the immediate impression it was AI generated.
I noticed it as LLM-written by the middle of the second paragraph. The text is filled with classic rhetorical structures LLMs love making, especially the "it isn't X, it's Y" and "not A, not B, not C, but D" patterns.
It’s the repetitive paragraph structure that raised my suspicions.
Sentence. Short sentence. Noun. Noun. Noun. Sentence to reflect. Wrap it up in a bow.
Sequences of short incomplete sentences, particularly in threes is such a tell
"Write a snarky, cynical opinion piece about Google in the style of Lewis Black."
The Opus 4.7 output was remarkably similar to the content in this blog.
hate pieces tend to rank highly. better if it's hating on big co
Why is the cat in the catnip again?
It has a good title
What makes you say that it was poorly written? I actually quite enjoyed it. I don't know if that says more about the writing, or me.
In english lit as a high-school student, I always thought I did reasonably well on my assignments, but consistently got C's. It was very infuriating.
"Everyone hates YouTube" is an argument that has a lot to overcome. All objective indicators suggest it is incredibly popular, and growing in popularity, pretty much across the demographic board.
This is pretty common across social media as well, surveyed sentiment towards it often negative while usage is high. I suspect it's because of the addictive quality.
But sentiment toward YouTube isn't negative. It is the most reputable social media in Morning Consult's brand reputation survey. It enjoys a higher reputation score than things like Cheerios and Tylenol. I don't think you can separate the reputation of the platform from the collective impression left by the creators, and people like the creators on YouTube. And, I propose, people largely DGAF about the platform features and presentation.
I hate it, but I still use it. The platform sucks, but most of the content isn't available anywhere else. Between the infrastructure cost, the difficulty of monetization, and the immense user/create base already invested in the platform, I don't think it's possible for anyone to compete with YouTube without government intervention.
All empires eventually decay and die.
Wang, Bull, Unisys, IBM, DEC, the Mongolian Empire, the Hungarian Empire, Dutch Empire, the Portugese Empire.... they all exist in some form, but are shadows of their former selves.
IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks.
Over time, the company became synonymous with failure and mediocrity.
I honestly think we're in a post-disruption era in that Google/Meta/Twitter/Reddit/etc. can't die. They have too much power and they've captured the entire population now. The internet isn't made up largely of enthusiasts anymore. Mediocrity is the strength of these platforms. The eternal September has made their home and they're not moving again.
I think Meta, Twitter and Reddit will lose relevance as younger generations move to different social networks. TikTok has already taken a bite out of the social media market, so has Discord.
Out of the four companies listed, Google is the one whose survival I’d bet on.
People thought that about all the other megacompanies that died too. This current crop is not special. Google has just announced they'll kill search and replace it with AI - think it'll still be strong after that?
> IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks.
IBM didn't die :-/
> And Search is just completely unusable now. They built an entire empire off our content. Bloggers, old forums, niche sites. We made the web worth searching in the first place. Now their AI Overviews just scrape our exact answers, strip out the hyperlinks, and repackage it in a blue box without linking back.
I don't like that they throw AI overview on your face when you search, rather they should show AI overview on the right column and search results on the left.
IBM is reinventing itself, no? From mainframe maximalists to purchasing HashiCorp, Red Hat, Confluent. All to capture enterprise for years to come. It seems as if IBM is making a comeback.
If you read their annual report they bet the farm on RedHat and Kubernetes. They spun off their legacy services business and have basically have monopoly power over the Federal government, banks and defense contractors. They have been buying out other Kubernetes vendors such as Kubecost. They are are pretty focused now, we will see how well they will do long term.
The technological world is rapidly changing and Google is changing with it. They are in a very strong position, owning the full stack in an industry that is very early and rapidly growing. They won't win all their bets but they have enough coverage for it not to matter.
I disagree with the Apple comparison. Apple haven't done anything successfully innovative for what seems like decades. I do admire their stance on AI though. Not going all in makes them unique.
Internally people feel like it's becoming IBM. Too many accountants and thinking only about money. Few things changed when AI race started but its still not enough to bring back old Google
I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?
The one point I will make though is: these people complaining about Google shutting things down is really just funny. It's like complaining about people having abandoned side projects. A healthy organization tries things. Not everything works out or is cashflow positive. That's life.
For reference Google has more employees than all Y Combinator companies combined. Keep in mind there are thousands of dead Y Combinator companies.
A better complaint about Google would be the lack of polish on many products. Take Gmail. Google made haste in adding the "AI Inbox", and yet you can't even read threaded emails in reverse chronological order. People have been complaining about this for nearly its entire existence. With the talent, and now AI - there's no reason such a thing couldn't be fixed tomorrow. It's just CSS and there are tons of chrome extensions that implement this. C'mon...
I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails) there isn't anything, say, to make really good proactive suggestions for like "apply this label to all incoming emails like this."
That sort of stagnation, though, and lack of their "trying things" really moving the needle compared to their decades-old ads product, makes me think they really are becoming the new IBM. IBM, in my estimation, has largely been irrelevant to the future of computing since the early 80s when MS ended up owning the PC story, but they have still had some quite solid stock prices runs at times over the decades (10x in five years at the end of the 90s, say). You can make a lot of money with a no-longer-that-interesting business.
I honest to God cannot see how someone informed at all could call Google stagnant. Name almost anything and Google is on the frontier. Quantum computing, self driving, language models, network infrastructure, TPUs, etc.
It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.
Nah, they're right. Google can only afford to do this because there are literally two players when it comes to online advertising. Remove advertising from Google and suddenly they can't subsidize failing BUs.
Kinda the point of preventing monopolies. They stagnate actual growth in the pursuit of profits. Americans don't benefit when Google is a trillion dollar company, but Americans would benefit if there was an actual competitive market.
Sure, and 20 years ago Walmart dominated retail. And yet, Amazon is winning now. Being #1 is never guaranteed. Plenty of more examples of this happening. Defending your position becomes increasingly difficult. We're literally seeing this right now with AI.
Okay fine, break up both Walmart and Amazon. Doubt you'll hear voters complain about the two companies that always make the most hated lists.
For self-driving, Waymo isn't technically Google anymore. ;)
I don't know anything about Quantum so I'll defer to you on that one.
In the LLMs/inference/ML space they seem to be great at theory and poor at execution until someone else shows them what the model looks like first. Similar to with cloud. Or with mobile. Or with voice assistants. Or with social (well, they never got there on that one even with the copy attempt.) Which is a classic "decline phase" behavior (see also Xerox, Bell).
If all Google products outside of their research papers and labs had disappeared ten years ago, what product categories would be missing?
YouTube has nearly the same MAU as Facebook. YouTube is definitely social, albeit different. The rest, well I respectively disagree.
That's fair. In my taxonomy it's media+ads, which was "fewer unique verticals" but it certainly has a heavy social component.
But it's also over 20 years old.
What kind of sicko wants to read an email thread in reverse order? I worked on gmail for years and never heard the first whiff of this being a thing that any sane person wants.
I would be willing to allow that there are probably some highly vocal people conditioned by OWA trauma who might have demanded this, but by no means a grassroots army.
is it really that weird to want to read the most recent email first? that's how the emails are already arranged. they just decide to not respect this when reading threaded emails. or is this sarcasm? lol
If you only use IMAP gmail is just good old email. I learnt about the AI inbox from your comment.
Yeah, IBM is nothing like Google, it's a weird comparison.
> I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. [...] I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?
Can't you even consider the possibility that the reader shutdown and the death of RSS might be causally related?
The Railway accusation focuses on 1 side of the story. No real details on if Railway did anything and if the suspension was warranted.
Google may not be wrong. Who knows. Easy to blame the larger company.
I tried to test an ad in the meta ad platform… and it is insanely terrible. Teams don’t care about B2B software even if it drives the business or there aren’t viable competitors.
While Apple does make nice hardware and appear to be listening to their users in that respect, don't forget that Tahoe has not been particularly well-received.
>YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. (...) I was a hardcore Android guy because it felt open. Sideloading, choice, freedom. (...) that toxicity doesn't show up on quarterly earnings yet. But it hollows you out from the inside. Word of mouth dies. The cult following evaporates.
It's despiriting when even anti enshittification blog posts bear all the style of AI created slop.
I hear this every 5 years for the last 15. And IBM is far from irrelevant.
> YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too
One thing that I really really hate Youtube for is that they don't allow users to turn off their shorts. You can choose to "reduce" Shorts for a given session, but they come back right next time.
That said, Youtube is tremendously valuable for its high-quality content. It's kinda like a restaurant. The service can be horrible. They decor can be hideous. But! I'm going back as long as the food is delicious.
You can go to Google Account > Data & Privacy. Then pause Youtube History. There will be no more feed on Youtube home screen. You will only see your /subscriptions feed. Little trick for a more peaceful life.
And that subscriptions screen has a row of all shorts across the top, and shorts trun up in searches and side bar related recommendations.
This while paying them for premium for 20 years.
There's a new setting rolling out in the YouTube app.
Go to settings > time management > shorts feed limit. Turn that setting on, and you can select how many minutes you limit to. There's now an option for "0 minutes".
This does nothing. It does not remove shorts.
On IOS/macos there's an app called "Unwatched for YouTube" which allows you to subscribe to channels via RSS (no need to login) and then you can turn shorts on/off per channel.
It's free for now but the developer has plans for some kind of subscription for premium features.
https://apps.apple.com/in/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
If you're not using Morphe, https://www.theverge.com/streaming/912898/youtube-shorts-fee...
> but they come back right next time.
I never once did playables and each time asking them to dismiss them. I wrote down every time I was re-prompted for over a year:
March 19, 2025 - 8:31 PM
April 9 - 4:09 PM
April 24 - 8 AM
May 9 - 5:33 PM
May 20 - 2:07 PM
June 8 - 5:10 PM
July 9 - 6:59 PM
August 9 - 5:14 PM
September 8 - 8:45 PM
November 9 - 8:47 PM
December 9 - 8:48 PM
Jan 8, 2026 - 9:28 PM
Feb 7 — 11:11 PM
March 10 - 9:18 PM
April 10 - 1:10 AM
May 10 - 7:53 AM
Yeah the 'not being able to turn off shorts' is such a brazen, anti-user form of enshitification. Alongside not being able to hide threads in Instragram (can only hide for 30 days), and so many other examples. Like there is enough demand for this that there are literally browser extensions to block shorts.
I can see why youtube don't want you to disable; because shorts are "addictive" in a certain moorish way and letting you disable would lesson your expected youtube use time.
But it's such a wierd choice on a certain level right. Like "lets make our product objectively worse for users because (in the short term?) we'll make more money". It's the sort of choice that does't really exist in the "real" "normal" economy. Like you bake some bread, you wanna make it as good as possible, I buy it from you because you make good bread.
So anyway I get why they do it. I'm just a little surprised that in their calculations the gains to engagement from forcing shorts are worth the loss of user goodwill. And even like employee morale right. Like how would you feel about your job if you're having to do this stuff, deliberately and explicitly curtailing the choices of your users.
But yes I agree the content is great.
If anything I think Microsoft is IBM
>YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too. Everyone hates the demonetization stuff but the low effort AI slop content is what really kills it for me. YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. But if you keep kicking off the actual suppliers and replacing them with low effort garbage, literally anyone can host that garbage.
I don't see slop on youtube and nobody I know is complaining about it. My current problem is private equity buying all the channels I love!
Veritasium, Fern!
Google is pure evil. The worst cyber-villain in human existance.
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This is as solid an argument as the article.
Is this AI authored rhetoric?
Google is officially the most evil company in the world