Finally, Could Google’s Chickens Be Coming Home To Roost?

Google is telling anybody who will listen that the APIs and functionalities built into its Google Cloud platform will remain stable over time and will not fall victim to arbitrary decisions by the company, a fiction designed to avoid discussion of the company’s longstanding disregard for its users, which has led it, over the years, to ruthlessly eliminate countless services that had large user bases.

Google’s infamous Spring Cleanings have long spread alarm among users, who feared seeing a product they had often invested time and effort disappear with little explanation. Over the years, Google has accumulated more than two hundred deleted products, carefully buried in the Google Graveyard, and the body count grows. What happened to the people who used those products? They went looking for alternatives provided by other companies.

The disappearance, on the flimsiest of pretexts, of Google Reader in March 2013, a product that had a significant user base in probably the most sophisticated segment, marked a turning point for many people, who realized that the company’s products were simply not reliable. Search with Google? No problem. Investing time and effort in using any Google product that requires you to put your information in it? A big mistake, because the company, whatever it says, can and will remove it at any time, for whatever reason. Simply put, Google cannot be trusted.

Now, with a 9% share of the cloud computing segment, where Amazon has a 32% market share and Microsoft 20%, the company is counting the cost of its reputation for holding its users in contempt as though it were the cornerstone of its corporate culture. A culture in which one of the fundamental elements is the principle of fail well: if you create a service and it doesn’t work, eliminate it without further ado and without affecting the internal reputation of those who created it… but without taking into account at all the interests of those who might be using it.

A culture of contempt for the user that goes far beyond simply removing or adding products, and that affects features, pricing policies and many other things, including SEO: Google is simply a company that I would never recommend anyone to depend on, or if you do, make sure you have full back up; which is the last thing you need in a cloud computing provider.

Now, Thomas Kurian, who signed from Oracle in 2019 to try to build a culture of corporate services at Google, is working to define new policies to generate confidence among its cloud computer users, long accustomed to being left stranded by Google and who know that the day after tomorrow Kurian will be somewhere else, and the promises he made will be worthless. Yesterday it was Google Reader, today it’s FeedBurner, tomorrow it will be something else: I’ve been trying to reduce my exposure to Google tools for a long time: I simply don’t trust the company. And I doubt very much that I’m the only one.

The hypothesis that there is some kind of universal justice out there and that people and organizations get what they deserve based on their behavior, and that everything happens for some kind of reason, is still one of the best-known fallacies of cognitive bias. But in this case, when it comes to trying to live with the reputation you have generated over many years, it can work. The first rule for cloud services is trust in the company providing them. Google, after treating its users like dirt for many years, now wants them to trust it. Watch those chickens come flying home.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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