Absolutely, it's something I researched while writing this article (since I knew someone would bring it up :)). Ultimately, I wanted to talk about concepts more than specific technologies, so I avoided going into detail on Spanner.
I don't claim to understand the underlying tech for Spanner, since I haven't read through the research paper fully. But my understanding is that write latencies are increased, which is a trade-off that has to be made. No matter what, _some_ trade-off is necessary, unfortunately.
