> 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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

Why's this poorly written piece on top of HN?

Google is pure evil. The worst cyber-villain in human existance.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

If anything I think Microsoft is IBM

This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object.

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.

I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs.

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.

I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death.

Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success.

Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions.

CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.

> 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.

Not true in the slightest. Google has had some quality hardware products where they killed the cloud service and rendered them useless. Products that were stable and working, but Google decided to pull the plug and make the hardware worthless.

Quality of the product means nothing. You’re at the mercy of the whims of Google’s decision making. The thing you like may stop working in a couple months.

Most people would argue that Stadia would have many. Many people loved Google Reader. There are numerous examples of things that were great and were killed, because they hadn't monetized enough or "fast enough", and when you are chasing results on a quarterly basis, you can't always get things that will generate tremendous value with more time.

I think the complaint about Google specifically is that they seem to do these things and commit to what seem to be whole lines of business without an actual business plan to make it viable.

It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.

I don't disagree with your point.

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?

> you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't.

They killed their chat app. Then had their pants on fire after Discord became the thing. The same can happen with any app they killed. So no, that's not 'taking risks'. Taking risks is shutting down perfectly working apps that can suddenly become 'the new thing'.

> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. ... you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't

Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community.

No one cares when they kill something niche.

I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic.

And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.

> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints

Exactly. I mean, you can argue forever about the stuff that got killed. But you know what didn't get killed? All the stuff they're turning into $4.6T of market cap.

In particular, they didn't kill AI. They're the only pre-AI tech giant with a successful frontier LLM, everyone else failed (Meta) or missed the boat (Apple, Microsoft[1]). They're the only tech giant[2] to produce working in-house datacenter AI hardware.

Making a lot of bets means that you make a lot of bad bets too. But Google has made a lot of good bets.

[1] Though MS got near-exclusive access to OpenAI via a very expensive late investment, which sorta counts.

[2] NVIDIA is giant now, they certainly weren't when these bets were being placed.

Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products.

If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.

I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails) there isn't anything, say, to make really good proactive suggestions for like "apply this label to all incoming emails like this."

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.

Yeah, IBM is nothing like Google, it's a weird comparison.

> I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. [...] I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?

Can't you even consider the possibility that the reader shutdown and the death of RSS might be causally related?

What kind of sicko wants to read an email thread in reverse order? I worked on gmail for years and never heard the first whiff of this being a thing that any sane person wants.

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.

If you only use IMAP gmail is just good old email. I learnt about the AI inbox from your comment.

You can go to Google Account > Data & Privacy. Then pause Youtube History. There will be no more feed on Youtube home screen. You will only see your /subscriptions feed. Little trick for a more peaceful life.

There's a new setting rolling out in the YouTube app.

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".

Yeah the 'not being able to turn off shorts' is such a brazen, anti-user form of enshitification. Alongside not being able to hide threads in Instragram (can only hide for 30 days), and so many other examples. Like there is enough demand for this that there are literally browser extensions to block shorts.

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.

If you're not using Morphe, https://www.theverge.com/streaming/912898/youtube-shorts-fee...

> but they come back right next time.

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

On IOS/macos there's an app called "Unwatched for YouTube" which allows you to subscribe to channels via RSS (no need to login) and then you can turn shorts on/off per channel.

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...