Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

I am reminded of this funny Feynman quote (paraphrasing): "The whole purpose of the existence of the Mensa club was to decide who else was eligible to join the club". Now, in all fairness, this is true of all the big tech companies to varying degrees, but boy does Google Cloud in particular take the cake on this one!

Of course, Big Tech does produce very good products, and at scale, but that is being built by about 10% of their engineers. The rest of them work there just to keep the interview loop as exclusive as possible. :-) After all, otherwise, one of them would have actually solved long runningcustomer problems.

Plus the rest of the world is now coming to an agreement that a lot of Big Tech's growth is coming from a lot of unfair advantages - such as massive data collection before it was understood as a bad thing, ability to lobby local politicians at a much bigger scale, ability to influence regulations that hurt them somewhat but entirely kill the competition (GDPR for example), complete lack of accountability for past malpractices (e.g. Facebook's friendly fraud case, for which no one went to jail) because they are now too powerful to actually be sent to jail.

I feel like this was super true in the pre Facebook days but they were humbled A LOT by the massive flop of Google plus.

I honestly don't feel like I get the my s * doesn't stink vibe from them anymore.

Especially because everyone knows their Achilles heel now.

But for their ad revenue what would they be?

Everything else material from came from an acquisition or is infra stuff.

It's cool but they also had to learn the hard lesson of Hadoop too.

Yeah they built big table... But the rest of the industry standardized on Hadoop (at the time) because they never released an implementation and so they started losing out on good hires because they didn't want to get locked into proprietary Google infra.

I think you see them recognizing this with intiatives like all of the stuff around kubernetes.

But hey I wouldn't build anything on their (non open) stuff and get more scared by the day over my dependence on El Goog because they've shown time an again how little they care for us common plebs.

But I feel like they get better when they lose but they've only started losing more recently

(Rant over)

GCP will fail, I think everyone knows it, and even if they don't, they fear it.

Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make less than a new grad at Google. It's extremely depressing to the extent that I can't get out of bed in the morning, but I'd wager that inferiority complex probably helps on the product side to empathize with customers.