Screaming in the Cloud - Google’s Graveyard and Lack of Hunger with Cody Ogden

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

On this week’s episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with the incredible Cody Odgen, software developer and creator of Killed by Google. Corey and Cody discuss Google’s graveyard of products, how discontinuing offerings creates a feeling of distrust amongst your customers, and why Google lacks the hunger needed to create an amazing generative AI tool. Corey shares his take on killed products from an AWS perspective while Cody draws comparisons between late’90s Microsoft and today’s Google, suggesting a decline in quality could be on the horizon for the cloud giant.Highlights(00:00) Intro(00:36) Ad - Panoptica(01:17) The Google Graveyard: Discussing Killed Services(02:11) AWS vs. Google: Service Termination Practices(03:17) AI Overload at Google Cloud Next(05:44) The Impact of Google's Decisions on Trust and Business(11:26) The Stadia Shutdown: A Case Study in Trust Erosion(14:11) Ad - Panoptica(14:34) The Ripple Effects of Google's Service Closures(18:50) The Importance of Longevity and Trust in Tech(23:25) Comparing Cloud Giants: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft(27:54) Closing Thoughts on Corporate Responsibility and Culture(28:48) Wrapping Up and Where to Find MoreLinks:Website: Killedbygoogle.comTwitter/X: @killedbygoogle* Sponsor Prowler: https://prowler.com

The people that they may piss off from a closure of something, you know, that they feel is relatively insignificant, may affect a decision that comes, you know, 10, 20 years down the line about a huge deal of who's going to be their services provider and who they end up feeling like they can trust. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My returning guest today is Chief Disappointment Officer at Killed by Google, Cody Ogden. Cody, how have you been? Oh, I've been really well. How are you, Corey? Meet Prowler Open Source. Designed for the hands-on professional, Prowler empowers you with an open, transparent platform to conduct detailed security assessments and compliance audits across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. Say goodbye to black box solutions and hello

to a customizable security tool that grows with your infrastructure. Start with confidence knowing you're using the tool trusted by industry leaders. Visit prowler.com to get your first security scan in minutes. I have been surprisingly well because I haven't seen much of you lately. Has Google taken a bit of a vacation from putting things on permanent vacation? You know, I think they've killed enough. There's not much left to kill, honestly, at this point. They've just sent it all off on the iceberg and just, you know, out floating in the ocean waiting to, you know, hit the next Titanic.

It's a, it's funny because I keep expecting and hoping that the whole killed by Google shtick turns into something that, okay, that was a very funny product of its time, but it hasn't really aged well. And the problem is, is that for whatever reason, they love to continually renew it. Yeah, you know, it's absolutely true.

I have yet to find a product that just hasn't aged well. Maybe one might be Wave, but I think that it's still kind of present in a lot of different products that currently exist at Google. So, yeah, you know, I can't think of one that hasn't aged really well. In my case, something that I've been doing for fun is like, all right, has AWS ever killed a service?

So I went digging and spent some time on this and I keep a running tally now. They've killed 23. And what's odd is that most of them have been killed in something different ways from one another. Like sometimes there'll be this giant thing where they wind up having a migration effort.

Sometimes it'll just be a quiet removal from a page. Sometimes it just emails to customers. But the difference here is I can't think of any of those things that has had people up in arms because they don't kill things that are broadly adopted as a general rule. They have some ridiculous stuff that winds up not hitting the market niche they thought. Like Amazon Sumerian, I think, was one of the very first. And that was building 3D avatar type things. And it was always a bit of a weird service and not really in their core competency. They never just show up one day and it's like,

so remember that S3 thing we used to talk about a lot? Funny story. Like these are not core services that are going to disrupt customer use. So it's weird, especially now that we are very much in the hype era of generative AI. I just recently got back from Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, which is a wonderful place to go spend a week, I promise. My biggest problem with it is that reInvent was only once a year. So how do I get out there more? Great. Thanks, Google. Good work. And I was excited on some level to learn about what they're changing for the services that I use in Google Cloud. Google Cloud Run is a masterwork. A lot of what they do with Kubernetes, now that I've been using that, is very intriguing to me. Their

fleet stuff is awesome. And I didn't get to hear about any of that because instead all they talked about was AI from start to finish, top to bottom. And that irked me. What was your read on it? Since I know you watch Google at least as closely as I do. Yeah, I mean, I agree. The theme of the entire event was really centered around AI and everything that Google is doing with AI. And I think my take on this is it really feels almost performative for Google at this point. I think that there's been some very

clear evidence that they've been a little behind the ball on getting some AI tech out the door and kind of showcasing it off to please the investor crowd. And my take is very clear. It seems like they were really trying to highlight, at least performatively highlight, all of the work that they're focused on around AI to really boost the stock price and keep things at least a little

level from there. What I'm trying to figure out is the why behind these things. It's easy for me to sit here in the cheap seats and talk about how these companies have lost their minds and why are they doing all of this. But I believe it or not, I am friends with people in the marketing orgs at these companies. talked to an awful lot of executives over the years. Companies don't hire idiots. These people are not like, I'm not going to sit here and think about the core of whatever it is that, that the company is doing and come up with a better approach and take on it in two minutes. Then they're going to come up with it as a full-time focus. So when I see things like this, that don't resonate and don't make sense, the question that I'm left with is what pieces am I missing? Yeah, I think that's a really valid point. I don't even know.

It really is. It's almost confusing really to see how they are kind of approaching even the more small to medium business side of things that could potentially grow into their, you know, next billion dollar customer, or at least have the people there that would be working for those next billion-dollar customers, right? And I mean, think like the last year's deprecation or sunsetting of Google domains, right?

Oh my God. Just imagine that experience for a business owner who's invested heavily in something that is even remotely related to cloud and what kind of distaste that would draw inside of them. Customers asked me about that because my customers are large companies. They run things everywhere and they want to get my opinion on these things from time to time. And they said, okay, so let me get this straight. They're selling their entire domain business to Squarespace. What's to stop them from getting bored of relational database and selling that business to Oracle in a couple of years?

You know, that is a damn fine question. I'm not here to carry water for Google. They're a big company. They can answer those questions themselves. Please, to the microphone. Yeah, it's a good question. And I think on some level, this over-focus on AI is dangerous along that axis because you can, I can make fun of Amazon, and I assure you I do, for not just being bad at AI, but being completely incapable of shutting up about AI from the customer perspective. But no one thinks, because they've seen Amazon, no one thinks that they're suddenly going to start ignoring their core principles.

And yeah, we're not going to touch EC2 anymore because Gen AI all the way. That is not how Amazon functions, and people know this. We have 15 years of track record on that. As a counterpoint, Google, as you well are well aware and point the way out for the rest of us, is always more interested in what it's building than what it's shipping. So, okay, you're only talking about this new Gen AI thing. What about all the existing stuff we've got? The tagline, the new way to cloud. Well, that's great because we just signed a 10-year deal on the existing way to cloud. What do you mean there's a new way to cloud? And that is something that is a perception that they are swimming upstream on.

And I've talked with Googlers about this and they argue with me on the data. And it's like, that's great. I have customer stories from discussions where they make decisions and meetings you're not invited to. This is what they're saying. I'm not making it up for funsies. It very much raises a question. And I think a lot of people,

a lot of like kind of sentiment that I see and the people that I interact with is very much a like, if they're very focused on this new thing and they're pushing this new thing heavily and it's kind of everywhere, for example, right now that's Gen AI or AI in general, who's maintaining, who's keeping the lights on? Are we investing in improving or, for example, right now, that's Gen AI or AI in general. Who's maintaining, who's keeping the lights on? Are we investing in improving or, you know,

making these other services that I'm critically reliant on? And are we going to continue investing in keeping those services, you know, accurate, efficient, and cost-effective for me as an owner? And I don't know the answer. That's something that Google definitely needs to address. But yeah, that reputation comes right along with it. If they're not keeping lights on,

is it at risk of being shut down? And that's the next question that those people tend to run into. Is this next? Is this next service? Is this going to be gone here in a year or six months or who knows?

I don't think that's really the case for pretty much anything of Google Cloud's major core services, at least. I don't think that's really the case for pretty much anything of, you know, Google Cloud's major core services, at least. I don't see them really taking that route. It's certainly not unplausible, but I don't think that they have any kind of avenue to that right at the moment.

During the Google Cloud Next keynote in 2018 or 2019, Adam Seligman, now VP at AWS, was there. I was doing the keynote. And at one point, we were talking about workspaces. And then, big dramatic reveal, with no context, a picture of Google Voice and its logo on the slide. And the audience was dead silent. And someone I talked to from Google was like, why was that? Did I get no reaction?

It's like, buddy, they thought you were about to kill it. It's, it was like, oh, because I keep, I've been using Google Voice. It's the number people have for me everywhere. And I have for at least 15 years now. And one of these days, I'm just waiting to get that email. I don't blame you. I mean, it's honestly the trajectory,

especially for something like Google Voice is very clear. They now started like killing specific people's accounts because they just haven't been using them, even though it's a number they may have had for 10 plus years at this point. They're like, we need to reclaim the number essentially. So yeah, I mean, it's definitely a shock. I think one of the recurring jokes that I make,

at least on Twitter, is about Google not keeping keep. Google keep their note-taking. It will become one day Google kept. Yeah, is about Google not keeping keep. Google keep their note-taking. It will become one day Google kept. Yeah, one day Google kept, exactly. And, you know, that radical response that I get from that, just the massive response that I get from any kind of indication or joke, and it's all in fun, of people taking that seriously

is just an absolute, is mind-blowing to me. Like people are absolutely scared to see this investment of time that they put into an application or where they're storing their information or anything just up in this sphere. And they have no power control over that matter. And that's an absolutely scary thing for a fair lot of people, let alone a business that's running on cloud, right?

I don't blame anyone for being traumatized, essentially, by an experience like that. I mean, Reader was the one that did it for me because it was, I understand it was part of the whole Plus initiative. Great. Awesome. But for a long time, reader.google.com was the website that my ADHD brain would idly type in when I was in front of an empty browser and was debating what to do next. And, okay, you've just abdicated that role. Okay, you couldn't find a way to monetize that. I want to talk a bit about Stadia because I thought that is a perfect example of the trend that I've seen around this. Because when Stadia was announced and you started predicting that it would be killed, you got a torrent of abuse

from Google fanboys left and right who basically said unrepeatable things to you that were awful. And then Google killed it because we've all gone through that cycle. I used to have staunch defenders of Google arguing with me about this stuff. And one by one, those voices have dropped off.

Those folks who are super big fans of Stadia and Google and the rest, what are the odds they're going to jump whole hog into the next Google product that catches their fancy? And I know that Google likes to say, well, that was a consumer-oriented offering. It wasn't a business-to-business thing. Why are people concerned? Even with Stadia, that's not actually true. It was actually a business-oriented operation if you consider that they were investing heavily

in providing very big kickbacks to dev studios to create Stadia-exclusive games and all kinds of B2B operations behind the scenes, even though it was a consumer-facing product for the end user. There was a lot of backdoor business stuff going on there. And those people found out about it from the same articles the rest of us did.

And many of them were laid off. Exactly. Exactly. Yep. That's the absolute killer thing. Yep. We had, we saw, I saw stories of devs who, or dev studios, small dev studios who were really relying on this kind of relationship with Stadia, right?

And they were like, literally three days ago, they were telling us everything's great and we're to proceed. And like, they're making investments in us. Like they literally just told us three days ago, they're going to do it. And now they're telling us it's gone. What a whiplash.

How do you recover your reputation from something like that? It's just such a hard question to ask, but it's a valid question, honestly, at this point. But yeah, Stadia was a wild, wild journey. And you're right, I got a lot of abuse from fanboys, people who really wanted to have that cloud gaming kind of become a reality and that streaming gaming come to reality. And I'm not going to lie, I bought Stadia. I want to try it out.

I'm a technologist, just like any other of these people that I talk with online. I'm always interested in a new technology. I want to try it. I thought the tech was great and that's no surprise. Google is excellent

at shipping good technology, even in the current AI-focused marketing world, right? They're excellent at shipping good technology. It's that, like, what goes beyond that? Maintaining a continuance of that technology and shepherding and fostering and, you know, cultivating that tech long-term is always the end question,

at least when it comes to Google. If you've ever felt boxed in by your security tools, it's time to break free with Prowler Open Source. Tailored for security and cloud architects who Thanks for watching. Join a community of experts making cloud security accessible and, as a bonus, understandable. Don't just monitor your cloud environment. Master it now at Prowler.com. opinions and chime in to those conversations. This pays dividends down the road. I used to be a huge advocate for Google services to the point where I evangelized them to friends and family. And when Google then does the, we're killing this thing, on some level, no one blamed me for it explicitly, but I felt that I had failed people. It's to the point now where I am extremely hesitant before recommending a Google product to my relatively non-technical social circle, just because it's a,

the blast radius of this going away for whatever reason is not insignificant. It's true. Yeah. I mean, like you, I've stopped pretty much entirely recommending anything out of kind of core Google services, right? So like Gmail or Calendar, those things that, you know, those things are never going to be killed. That's Google's moneymaker. Which is kind of a shame on some level, because those things are the closest we have to things that have standardized APIs that interoperate with a bunch of other stuff. It would be annoying, and I'd have to wait for some DNS things to settle. But yeah, I could migrate all of my entire history of Gmail inbox since I migrated in 2010 or so

down to back to any number of other providers. It might take a little while to do the transfer, but great, I can repoint my domains records because I don't use their domain for these things. And I continue in business as I want. That same with calendar. The ICS files for export, the iCal feeds that you can wind up syncing with.

Great, awesome. It's always the stuff that you can't really repeat easily. There was no Google Reader equivalent at the time. Feedly launched in basically a panic. And earlier this year on Kubernetes, I started running freshrss.org myself, self-hosting. It's kind of amazing. It opened up a bunch of opportunities and doors and, oh, this is awesome. But it's just the things that they kill are always the things that it seems don't have good alternatives or egress. The dumbest cloud cancellation I saw was

their IoT core offering. It was, let me get this straight. The one cloud service you're going to cancel now is the one that people embed into hardware and ship to end users. And in some cases will not come back online for a couple of years at a time. And you're going to what now? Like it was, it's like there was no long-term thinking. Like they, they tend to view this solely in terms of that one product or that one very specific line of business without considering the broader halo effect. And I think that's a symptom of very large companies.

I mean, we joke about Google's kind of internal view of things that I've seen floated around as the, like, if it doesn't have a billion users or isn't making a billion dollars, like, they're not ever going to keep it. And at this point, it's true. I mean, I would say that that seems very accurate. If they're not getting a billion dollars from it, they're not getting a billion users from it,

like they have no reason to spend any even kind of rounding error amount of money to keep that service online. However, we say that, and then we look at things like FeedBurner and Blogspot. And I do question them like, really, we're keeping these things online, things that are objectively horrible and that no one uses in decades. But sure.

Right. I have that with AWS too. It's like, okay, if I could kill three AWS service, I want you to kill this one three times over. It's the, like, make that, they could go away. But it's never that stuff. It seems to me that companies want all the benefits of the global brand and the halo effect,

but then they're very quick to say, well, our consumer vision can't be compared to our cloud division. It's like, well, I don't know, you're slapping ads on kind of everything. So I don't know, that's kind of a corrosive influence. Can it be? Yeah, I mean, I think everything. So I don't know, that's kind of a corrosive influence. Can it be? Yeah, I mean, I think it ultimately comes back

to that same, that reputation damage. And it's not just developers, it's literally anyone. The people that they may piss off from a closure of something, you know, that they feel is relatively insignificant may affect a decision that comes, you know, 10, 20 years down the line about a huge deal of who's going to be their services provider

and who they end up feeling like they can trust. I don't think that they're hitting that yet, but they will start. I mean, we're getting almost 10 years now since, well, now over 10 years since Google Reader, and that's just culminated in the past 10 years of different services have been killed. I think we're going to start seeing some of that sentiment

come around into the B2B area for them around trust and reputational issues. I think in some circles it already has. And that's depressing because we see that I want AWS to have a credible competitor. And Google is the best shot they've got for companies that have a bit of a problem with Azure's Swiss cheese approach to security.

So there's a... I don't want that to not be viable because they keep killing things. Stop it. I mean, it's like I said, like they put good tech, like you, like you said,

cloud run is, is great. As far as like a technology offering goes. And that's awesome. We know they put out good tech. That's the reputation that comes with whatever tech they put out. That's going to affect them. What,

one thing they had a poster I saw, if it was a poster or if it was one of their slides in one of the keynotes, it all runs together when you're basically mainlining cloud conference. They said 90% of AI startups are Google Cloud customers. And I think the impression they want people to take away from that is, wow, I didn't know that Google was in so many companies. From a cloud perspective, this is real. And honestly, what I want to do is I want to meet some of the 10% of companies that aren't using Gmail or Google Docs. How does that work? What does your collaboration flow look like? I want to learn from you. How do you do it? It's like, on some level, that'd be like AWS saying that, what is it? Like 90% of startups are Amazon customers.

Like, okay, you want to think that in terms of cloud, but it's like, yeah, everyone winds up buying underpants on their store or whatnot. It's like you don't really get to conflate those in quite the same way. Yeah, it would be really interesting to see the breakout of Google Cloud away from the productivity software suite

versus the actual cloud services, I would be very fascinated to see what that actually looks like and what that breakdown ends up being, especially because they just read prices on the productivity suite too. Oh yeah. The pricing increases, I actually like seeing those, which makes me sound psychotic. But it's like, you like paying more to giant companies? No. It shows that they are, in fact, aware that this thing does make money, and they would like it to do more of that, please.

Which, great. There was almost no price that they could have charged with a straight face for Google Reader that I would not have paid to keep that around. Absolutely. Inbox, same. Yep. 100%. And it's just a, there are so many ways that this could work in different approaches, but I guess it's,

it's the point of scale where at some point who's actually driving the ship. There is so many, there are so many layers between people in executive decision-making capacities and people doing the day-to-day work, hands-on keyboards on computers, that there's such a disconnect. I don't know that that can ever be crossed. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because, at least from my knowledge, they are aware of their reputation.

I have no doubt that they're aware of that reputation that exists in their customer base and their prospective customer base even. But how they are tackling that or even addressing that reputation is non-existent. It just doesn't exist. They're not even tackling the actual core issue ultimately. And that has to come from the top. It has to come from the top, essentially, to address that longevity issue or that longevity question even for what they're releasing or the things that they're putting out there for users, whether it be B2B or consumers even, to adopt into their daily workflows.

So, yeah, I just, I agree with you. It starts at the top, and I just don't see it ever being addressed from that level, really. I had the privilege of having dinner with Jeff Barr a while back, AWS's chief evangelist and VP. And honestly, I don't know why I have to introduce Jeff Barr to anyone listening to this show. He is basically the guy that taught us all how cloud works, one of the nicest people I know.

And that is a high bar. I know a lot of nice people. And his observation was that, you know, S3 is a fascinating service when you view it through the lens that we don't know what data customers have in there. So we have to treat all of it as being incredibly important. So it is a service that has been put into so many different uses in so many different places that it cannot ever be turned off full stop. So when you look at building

technology services with an eye towards this has to last for centuries, it really changes your perspective. And I'd never thought of it that way, but he's absolutely right. Because in any other context, you talk about building a company or a platform or a product to last centuries, people look at you like you busted a sprocket. But he's right. As long as the bill gets paid, it has to be treated like it's potentially the nuclear codes, because for all we know, it is. Yeah, I mean, I 100% agree. Like, I don't see that same perspective out of Google, really. I mean, even with this most recent Cloud Next, right? Like, it was entirely focused on AI. And don't get me wrong, I love AI.

I think it's a great technology. I do too. I don't want to sound like I'm a detractor here. I'm not. Exactly. That's the same thing with me. Like I tend to be like, I'm not skeptical of AI. Like I want to embrace it, but I want to embrace it right.

You know, I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of that we can grow and build there. But the longevity is always the question when it comes to Google. So I'm naturally like going to, you know, more, I don't know, hungry, I guess, is a great way to look at OpenAI. They're hungry to build something. They're hungry and interested to build an AI that does something. OpenAI is hungry to build something related to AI, right?

Google isn't hungry. They're sitting on a mountain of cash. They don't need to be hungry to be driven to build an AI that serves, that works, that is there forever. It seems almost like they're hopping on the trend. I hope not. I hope that they want to actually invest in 100 years from now what AI looks like. But I don't know.

That's always the kind of open-ended question with them whenever they bring up a new technology. You and I are both often frequently misunderstood from the lens of that we are detractors of these companies. No, we want them to be better than they are. We want them to have a good customer experience. I would love to be able to suggest Google Cloud in some cases without sounding like I'm negligent in so doing.

I would love to be able to point at Amazon treating its employees super well. I can't do that. So there's a, it's just make tomorrow better than it is today. I think you're onto something as well about it sitting on its giant pile of money. And this might very well be the problem is that Amazon, for all of its faults, the nature of, you can't build a hyperscale cloud without it being subsidized by something else. Amazon did this by building out a retail operation with very thin margins. Cloud margins are pretty fat compared to that. Conversely, it turns out that showing ads to people on search is a remarkably

high margin business. And compared to that, cloud is only so-so. And I think that there's a certain frugality that got built into Amazon as a result of that, that made the whole enterprise work. Because you can always start spending more money on something, but it's very hard to cut the addiction to the high fat revenue of the ad stuff. And ads are inherently, increasingly, of the belief that become a corrosive force at any large company that inevitably wind up corrupting the thing that they set out to do in the first place.

The AWS marketplace shows ads now, for God's sake. I mean, we can also look at other companies like Microsoft. I mean, look at their trajectory arc. Like, they came into, you know, out of the 90s, just absolutely on top of the world, hit into the 2010s with a slump of they came into, you know, out of the 90s, just absolutely on top of the world, hit into the 2010s

with a slump of Windows Vista, Windows 11, and all that. What even is cloud? Yeah, yeah. So, like, Microsoft's, you know, they even,

like, yeah, like you said, what even is cloud, right? They've, you know, had a redemption arc essentially this past, you know, almost 10 years now

where they've, they kind of reconciled internally, hey, like this ain't working. Like we got to change trajectory here. And they started investing heavily in that developer audience and the people that actually like they need to care about in order to build a working. And I'm not saying Azure is great, right?

But like Microsoft in general, their reputation has really improved compared to what it was 10 years ago. I think we're probably looking at the same idea with Google. They're kind of on top of the world. They've been on top of the world for a few years right now. They've gotten a little complacent. It's not that they're not investing in tech. The tech is good, but they're just not investing in the future.

And once they get back into that mindset, I don't know what it's going to take, but once they do get back into the mindset, I think they can right the ship. But at the moment, it's always going to be that open-ended question, what are they going to kill next? I'm scared to hear the answer to that question, but I feel like we won't be

able to avoid it. Yeah, I mean, ever since I've been to San Francisco, I always joke, I'm looking over my shoulder for a Googler for, I have no idea what's going on in my building right now. It's not a fire, but are we done, guys? Ever since I've been to San Francisco, I'm always looking over my shoulder to

look for Google Earth just in case. Oh, yeah. It's fun. I think that, honestly, by and large, the employees of these companies are great. I don't have an issue with them. Truly, I don't. My point is not to make them feel crappy about what they're doing. I don't think some random PM

or developer or whatnot, it has the power to change this nature at any of these companies. It, culture flows from the top. And on some level, like there's a reason that you make money beyond the wildest dreams of avarice for your executive level role at these companies. And that's because the responsibility

starts and stops with you. I 100% agree. I really want to thank you for taking the time starts and stops with you. I 100% agree. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you? Oh, you can find me at killedbygoogle.com or on Twitter at killedbygoogle. I'm sorry, X at killedbygoogle. No, no, I don't believe in dead naming except when it comes to that company. It's Twitter.

All right, Twitter. Twitter at Killed by Google. And we will, of course, put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time, Cody. It's always great to talk to you. Thank you as well. Cody Ogden, Chief Disappointment Officer at Killed by Google. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that I'll never read because that product of choice is, of course, Google's, and it's about to get whacked.