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.
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.
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.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Google.
Seems apropos.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, it's what Google used to do by releasing everything as "Beta". Gmail was in Beta for 5 years with millions of users.
If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.
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.
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.
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 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!
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 come back and pay as long as the food is delicious.
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".
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.
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
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...
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...
Can't you even consider the possibility that the reader shutdown and the death of RSS might be causally related?
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.
It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.
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?
But it's also over 20 years old.
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.
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.