After being bitten a few times by Google unceremoniously shutting down services, it feels like unnecessary risk-taking to build software on their infrastructure.
It doesn't have to be as dramatic as a complete shutdown. I bought into Google Apps for Business on the implicit promise it could one day completely replace desktop office apps.
All serious development has slowed down to a crawl. New developments are mostly cosmetic. Bugs never get fixed. Microsoft, miles behind not so long ago is now streets ahead with Office 365, and Google has quite clearly stopped giving a crap.
Google has never shown any interest in the long term pursuit of any product or service that couldn't be sufficiently exploited for advertising, directly or indirectly (collecting data to sell to advertisers), paid or unpaid.
> When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy development like GCE and GAE?
As far as I know, never. I've been compiling a list of live and shut down services/products/etc (~299 so far), and while payment doesn't seem to be an important factor (plenty of shut down paid things, including many more advertising services than I expected), I cannot name a service which was under heavy development and was shut down during said development. However, I think that is just because development tends to stop before the final death knell. Reader, for example, used to regularly update and improve during its heyday.
It's not public yet; I haven't finished it (I need to code 4 variables for like 100 entries, since I only thought of the variables partway through assembling the list, and I have 3 or 4 pages to check for additional entries) and the analysis (logistic regression on the variables, and survival curves).
The idea is to try to predict future shut downs, but it's turned out to be a lot more work than I expected...
They don't have to shut it down. They can raise price dramatically, like the Map API price hike, to drive people off. The thing is we don't know whether the current price is viable for Google or not, or whether it will stay viable tomorrow. It's just there are too many of these instances that people have lost trust. Once trust is lost, it's very difficult to earn it back.
I suppose it wasn't very popular, or under heavy development, but I used Google Translate, and also was impacted when AppEngine went through the crazy price hikes.
It has to do with margins and focus. Companies time and time again sell /shut down profitable divisions, simply because they're not performing "good enough," whatever that may mean. Google essentially has no competition in advertising so anything else is a joke compared to that. Who knows?
Google's done a great job shutting down much used and loved services. Perhaps it'd be a good idea for them to get behind what they're committed to supporting long term and make some public commitments.
It's not so much the difference between free and paid that matters as whether or not the pricing is actually economically viable. The original GAE pricing pretty obviously wasn't, so it might as well have been a free product in that you were relying on Google continuing to want to subsidize it for whatever reason.
How do we as customers know whether a pricing posted by a company is viable or not? What is the criteria for viability? Someone didn't get his bonus because of growth not meeting target? Or the engineering budget has blown up passed expectation?
GAE had to become self-sustaining and now it's less of a risk for its customers. Google wants GCE to compete with AWS so pricing will be have to be competitive.
