I remember every single article when they first announced contained at least a few sentences wondering when Google would shut Stadia down. Because it was a Google project, Stadia was doomed from the start.
Google only knows how to do one business. Ads. Any Google product that isn't ad-supported dies, with very few exceptions.
Note that Google Cloud Services lose money. "Google Cloud is now approaching a $16 billion annual revenue run rate, but Google's ad business is likely to subsidize it for the foreseeable future."[1] AWS makes money in that business, but Google does not.
So, don't depend on Google Cloud for anything critical. Only a few months ago, Google was saying they were not going to shut down Stadia. So, any PR statement about Cloud not shutting down can't be believed. Stadia, after all, was a cloud service.
Google's reputation is dooming GCP. On the one hand you want to say "GCP is way to big for Google just to kill" but you never know, which makes the decision to use AWS all that much easier. I honestly wonder if Google will stick it out and make GCP a true competitor to AWS or if they will just kill it in years time.
Amazon publicly stated that they ran their own business on AWS, and however much of an exaggeration that might have been, it gave people the confidence to try it out. The reasoning was clear: if AWS handles Amazon-scale business, they can surely handle my smaller workload.
Google is starting with a handicap, in that they have a very strong reputation for killing products that don't meet unknown high standard of performance/revenue. I mean, the term "Google Graveyard" is popular, although I prefer Killed By Google[0]. To counter that handicap for GCP, they need something that stands out as much as Amazon's initial claim, and I haven't seen it. It seems clear that Google isn't running their own infrastructure on GCP. If anything, the hope seems to be that they've spent so much money on GCP, surely they wouldn't shut it down after all of that?
But of course, the bright sparks at Google are aware of the Sunk Cost Fallacy as well as anyone else, so... yeah. I have trouble trusting it.
> Amazon publicly stated that they ran their own business on AWS, and however much of an exaggeration that might have been, it gave people the confidence to try it out. The reasoning was clear: if AWS handles Amazon-scale business, they can surely handle my smaller workload.
I think even more important than the scalability, it implies AWS isn't going away as long as Amazon is in business.
I was on a blind focus group for cloud offerings. Turned out to be Azure, but every IT person their ranked them AWS, Azure, GCP. And GCP was #3 only because Oracle was universally hated
I mean if I had to bet development time and a product/service that has to run for years I wouldn’t bet it on GCP, precisely because of Google’s reputation.
I’m confident AWS will exist in a decade, I’m not confident GCP will. I would never recommend a dependency on a Google service, especially not one that matters where there’s potentially millions of dollars on the line.
I deployed stuff on GCP but we moved to AWS after stability issues and horrendous support experience on GCP.
And that was easy because we did not commit to any GCP exclusive services (because they tend to shut down all thr time). On AWS we prefer using things like DynamoDB and that further locks us into AWS.
Funny, we use GCP extensively and never have any issues. I can't speak to the support issues because we've never needed any. AWS is a bit of a mess, and I always dread having to use it.
Cloud has had over 135-153% YoY revenue growth every quarter since they started reporting Cloud revenue 11 quarters ago. It's amazingly consistent high growth.
TAC (traffic acquisition costs) have exploded over this time frame. If you subtract TAC from Services revenue, the growth is merely good. Cloud revenue also seems a lot less sensitive to the recent economic downtown so far, but we'll really know after Q3.
The operating losses for Cloud are also shrinking quickly. Building data centers should be capex, but I'm guessing they count R&D as opex, which makes the losses higher now even though it will pay off later like an investment. They could probably start to have operating income any time in the next 3 years.
Of course GCP is losing money, have you seen their rate of investment in new datacenters and services? That shit is extremely expensive. AWS was losing money for many years too, they're at entirely different places.
> Difference is, AWS was growing into a void. Google has to contend with established leaders.
Yes, but also the market is much bigger now, and the cloud isn't something abstract people need to be convinced about. It's the de facto standard now.
> GCP is basically number four globally in cloud - with Alibaba being number three
Alibaba is niche in that few people outside of Asia would use it. It's still an enormous market, but GCP/AWS/Azure and Alibaba don't compete for the same workloads in the majority of cases. So there's plenty of place under the sun for GCP, if Google want it. Them killing it would be b2b suicide.
I think folks can finally accurately model what Google is going to kill... GCP surely wouldn't be on that list? ;)
> You can pretty accurately model what they will and won't do with this one unusual insight that they're a business... But "It's a Google product" is a weak signal about whether it's going to get killed, and there are many stronger signals. Let me know when they kill Ads and Cloud.
I realize Google is making a bet on the long term of cloud, but... it's continuing to bleed money making that investment. Meanwhile, AWS is also seeing large growth numbers while remaining very profitable.
So, while I get the "investment for the long term" angle that Google is pitching for GCP, how long will they decide to continue making that investment while they lose money on it, chasing a profitable AWS
How can they lose money at the prices they charge? They already had all the expertise to run data centers and build infrastructure. I get that there's development effort, but how can you bleed billions annually over years? Or do they discount that heavily for large customers?
I believe Cloud is an investor's playground at this point, given the huge opportunity that it presents. The fact that AWS makes a profit is due to its market position, which IBM Cloud, Oracle, Azure, and GCP have been chipping away at steadily, even if slowly. For GCP and AWS, I believe missing out on GitHub was a big mistake. Though, I fully expect GCP to loosen the purse strings for similar companies in the near future, esp given Azure/Microsoft have been on a tear of late.
On the other hand, I also remember all the hype that it received (though maybe I live in a tech-obsessed bubble). "OMG, it will change everything you know about gaming". All my colleagues were so convinced that it was a technical breakthrough (maybe it was, I dunno), and that everyone will be playing with it because it is simply so amazing and revolutionary.
My opinion was "yeah, cool, but I just don't see it". It was very annoying when these coworkers judged me, thinking I am simply too stupid to realize how amazing this is...
I think there was and still is potential in cloud game streaming, its more a failure in execution. In theory we have an incredible amount of mostly idle silicon in peoples homes that with raising bandwidth and decreasing latencies become increasingly wasteful. It seems to me quite obvious that eventually there will be no particular reason why we need game consoles or high-powered gaming pcs at all. We can get much better efficiency if the compute necessary to render and simulate games happens in a shared cloud system.
Not that the economy really cares about wasteful consumption now of course, but there might be natural influences that may eventually force it to care about it.
We also never really explored what cloud-native games actually mean. Like what could we do with cloud games that we couldn't on a console? What does it mean to the compute budgets, to asset streaming, to multiplayer between cloud instances, if we could more efficiently use gpu resources if multiple players use the same gpu to play the same game, can we make multiplayer games in the cloud that are impossible any other way? etc. It feels like no game developer thought about what cloud gaming actually could mean, this could be a very exciting space in a few decades from now.
I think Stadia wasn't really a product developed by remotely competent people, they did so many mistakes that it feels like almost anybody could've told them. There even were detailed early reviews of the many issues with the platform, but they never addressed any of them. Its like they burned money it was weird.
Tying it to an expensive, mediocre controller instead of "runs on anything with a modern browser" was especially confusing to me, it seemed so incredibly foolish.
"Brutally expensive and competitive" is right. Look at what Microsoft had to do after losing the Xbox One / PS4 generation. They've spent almost a decade building out a radically new subscription service. That's before the $100+ billion they've dropped on studios for content to fill out said service.
