They seem to think they have plenty of developers to burn through like this as if they were some sort of consumable.
But if every developer who has been banned can get other developers banned just by association, this will start slow and then move like an epidemic.
They don't know it yet but unchecked this will seem to them to instantly become an existential threat to the play store. There's nothing like a geometric progression to make you think everything is a-ok just before it all goes to hell.
Yeah Amazon (especially AWS) is pretty decent with customer service all things considering.
I've heard of people getting hacked and having huge bills because they stared up bitcoin miners with their account. I think AWS actually refunded the charges.
Scary to think if Google would do the same as easily.
I know one person that is using Google Cloud for his company. He used to work at YouTube, so it's very handy for him since it works very similarly. But otherwise I don't know anyone using it for any production workloads.
Welp, today you get to meet one, hi, I'm klardotsh!
Don't get me wrong - I hate it and wish we were on AWS for a multitude of reasons, but we use Google Cloud at Lumen5 and despite my personal distaste for it, it mostly "just works" most of the time, even if almost zero of the setup is intuitive. Their Kubernetes offering is a stronger sell than AWS's (IMO) which is a big reason we've stuck with it.
At this point it's hard to quantify the likelihood of being ruined by Google arbitrarily banning you, but at some point that needs to factor into the calculation just like an SLA or major disaster insurance. If there's a 0.01% chance you'll get screwed by Google, but the service is 10% better/cheaper, maybe that's a worthwhile risk? But the numbers are not moving in the right direction.
Bear in mind that Niantic (company behind Pokemon Go) was originally an incubated project within Google. So they have plenty of reasons to stick with GCP for the hosting. As for Snapchat they were originally on Google App Engine so that incentivised them to stick with the platform as well. But for new companies starting today it'd be a tough sell to use most of GCP.
I moved all my deployments to google cloud. I've started to use it originally because BigQuery was light years ahead of any foreseeable competition (Athena didn't even exist). I've stayed for awesome firebase. gcp has great offerings.
Google Cloud looks fantastic, but I could never trust it for anything beyond hobby projects: Google's policy of minimal support and seemingly-arbitrary algorithmic decisions regarding customers makes for more risk than I am willing to accept from a single component.
If Google's leadership were self-aware at all (they're not), they'd spin Google Cloud out from under their anti-customer super corporate.
GC should be aggressively isolated from the stupidity in the larger company when it comes to how they incorrectly deal with pretty much anything that involves humans. They'd need to put someone in charge of it that has vast experience building very customer-focused enterprise businesses. They need to de-Googleify the whole business top to bottom. This would also go a long way toward eliminating the well-earned fear about how Google loves to kill off products/services.
If they don't do that, they will never stand a chance competing with Amazon or Microsoft in cloud. They'll be a far smaller, permanent #3 in the US market, best case scenario.
I just started using BigQuery, and I have no idea how people tolerate it. Can't delete a column. Can't rename a column. Can't change a datatype of a column. If I added a wrong column, I have to recreate the whole table (via SELECT * EXCEPT).
Our startup has $30k free credits from Google cloud but I would have to be crazy to put our production website on Google and their ban hammer + "charming" customer support.
Similar attitude toward employees and even customers is spread across companies: there are always a near infinite number remaining.
It could be a perverse inverse manifestation of the 20/80 rule on an algorithmic or institutional scale: so long as we're only losing x% it doesn't matter because some in the excluded group might have been more effort to deal with.
>become an existential threat to the play store.
This will require a viable alternative and a wide spread reputation that they are a regular business killer.
To this comment and others. I don't actually even mean that the existential threat is people choosing to leave. I mean that the progression of banned accounts will spread like an actual pandemic because of the rule that any account that associates with a banned account will also become banned.
I mean to say that everything will seem fine and suddenly they will find that their algo has banned most of their users, like a play-store zombie apocalypse. It will seem instant and inexplicable to them, and the damage will be done.
> They don't know it yet but unchecked this will seem to them to instantly become an existential threat to the play store
Unfortunately when there are realistically only 2 app stores, and considering Apple devices cannot use the Google Play Store it doesn't matter. Google can do what it wants, just like Apple can do what it wants as for there is no real consequence. There will always be another developer willing to take a dollar less for the same thing and abide by the 'rules'. We absolutely need diversification, but until these companies are split up it will never happen.
He's not saying developers will stop choosing the Play store, rather that the Play store will have banned everyone that would potentially use it, as associations explode.
It may be my wishful thinking, but I sense that there's a number of dominant players in various areas (I suppose some of the FAANG) merrily leaving a trail of burned customers, following a similar "geometric progression" toward some critical threshold of awakening, when it's too late to gain back the trust everyone knows they don't deserve.
But if every developer who has been banned can get other developers banned just by association, this will start slow and then move like an epidemic.
They don't know it yet but unchecked this will seem to them to instantly become an existential threat to the play store. There's nothing like a geometric progression to make you think everything is a-ok just before it all goes to hell.