- > 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.
by somesortofthing
11 subcomments
- 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?
by coderenegade
3 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- > 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...
by siliconc0w
0 subcomment
- 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.
by 0xbadcafebee
1 subcomments
- 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.
by linkregister
1 subcomments
- 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.
by ismepornnahi
7 subcomments
- Why's this poorly written piece on top of HN?
by KnuthIsGod
2 subcomments
- 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.
by thevivekshukla
0 subcomment
- > 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.
- 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
by illusive4080
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- Google is pure evil. The worst cyber-villain in human existance.
- 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.
by light_hue_1
0 subcomment
- > 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.
by amazingamazing
5 subcomments
- 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...
- 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.
- "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.
by CSMastermind
0 subcomment
- 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!
- I hear this every 5 years for the last 15. And IBM is far from irrelevant.
- 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.
by Ayushkumar1808
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by sieabahlpark
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- [flagged]
- Google is officially the most evil company in the world
- Is this AI authored rhetoric?
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