To give you the depth of my misgiving here, I just can't see them sticking it out as the third place provider. Maybe they won't kill GCP, but I could easily see them gradually lowering their focus until I would regret having built anything on it.
It's easy to talk about Google apps that have been killed. But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
So given that, I can take in and acknowledge what you're saying about GCP having good or even great support. I just don't have any faith that it will last.
I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple. I pay a small amount to Apple and have no problem getting my support rep on the phone and all support experiences I've had there have been amazing. So why doesn't the Android experience compare? I just don't see it in Google's DNA to fight to win. Android has given up and is trying to be the lowest quality second place they can be. And that's exactly what I expect to happen from GCP. Maybe GCP will fight hard at the beginning to establish itself, but after that, I expect them to do the minimal amount to maintain third place.
> I just can't see them sticking it out as the third place provider.
Maybe that's the case, but I can't see it. Cloud computing is such a huge business, it doesn't take more than a third-place position to make more money than say, Youtube. Some random article [1] has GCP's 2019 Q4 revenue at $2.6B compared to Youtube at $4.7B, and total revenue in the cloud market is definitely going up way faster than total revenue in the advertising market. Plus, the "Google sucks at products" narrative is based on a reputation that people at Google would much rather be building technology than products. Cloud computing seems like the perfect match for such a reputation. App Engine is almost as old as AWS, and looks very much like it started as an excuse to have something for Guido Van Rossum to do.
> I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple.
> So why doesn't the Android experience compare?
It came out in the Google vs Oracle lawsuit that Android had only made Google something like $10B since it started. So GCP is already making something like 10x what Android makes, and given cellphone saturation this will likely only grow.
> But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
AWS has a whole pile of services that you can tell no longer get any attention, or in some cases, even have full time staff anymore. Services that still aren't integrated with CloudFormation after years and years because clearly nobody cares. A guarantee that the lights stay on and the service continues to handle requests is the most you can ask or get from any of the existing cloud providers.
It's easy to talk about Google apps that have been killed. But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
So given that, I can take in and acknowledge what you're saying about GCP having good or even great support. I just don't have any faith that it will last.
I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple. I pay a small amount to Apple and have no problem getting my support rep on the phone and all support experiences I've had there have been amazing. So why doesn't the Android experience compare? I just don't see it in Google's DNA to fight to win. Android has given up and is trying to be the lowest quality second place they can be. And that's exactly what I expect to happen from GCP. Maybe GCP will fight hard at the beginning to establish itself, but after that, I expect them to do the minimal amount to maintain third place.