7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if it intends to
discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to the
Services specified at the URL in the next sentence. Google
will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to
operate those Services versions and features identified at
https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation without these
changes for at least one year after that announcement, unless
(as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):
(i) required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or
(ii) doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.
The above policy is the "Deprecation Policy."
If you click through to https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation you will see the covered services.
(Reasonable good faith is a legal term of art, so no, Google would not get away with whatever silly edge case people come up with)
This is the best guarantee any company ever gives.
For smaller companies if something becomes too expensive or hard, they just go out of business. For larger companies, they have to draw the line somewhere. You won't get stronger guarantees from anyone, that would be insane.
Google definitely has a history of turning down free services when they're proving unprofitable, but that's only free services. There's no history of Google turning down paid services without good notice that I know of.
Many of the products Google has already shut down would easily have passed a reasonable good faith judgement that they were too expensive to keep running. I don't see how this would be any different. I know that "reasonable good faith" is a legal term of art, and I'm saying that I don't think Google would struggle to meet that standard if they needed to shut one of these services down.
"Many of the products Google has already shut down would easily have passed a reasonable good faith judgement that they were too expensive to keep running."
That isn't the standard listed.
It's "substantial economic burden".
None of those services were a substantial economic burden for a many-billion dollar company, so sorry, but i completely disagree.
What does "protection" and "guarantee" really mean? If a dozen meteors simultaneously strike every Google datacenter and office location, would the products continue to live on, even in the face of every conceivable guarantee their leadership makes before the event?
Point being; the only guarantees that any consumers should hold companies accountable to is: Does the product make money, and is it parallel to their conceivable long-term vision? That's literally all that matters. That's the only data consumers can use to decide whether a product will still exist in 10 years.
Google Cloud is this. Its absolutely profitable. And cloud tech is so deep in their DNA, they're literally decades ahead of anyone else. They were running containers and clusterized homogeneous server resource pools 8 years before anyone else knew to call them that, its just taking them time to productize everything they use internally.
Trust money. Trust vision. Don't trust words. G-Suite, Cloud, and Domains are very safe products.
No, it wouldn't require them to keep it operating if all of Google was simultaneously destroyed by meteors. But it would probably allow lawsuits against Google if they didn't give the required advance notice merely due to a change in business strategy, without a sufficient reason.
Interestingly, AWS doesn't have that kind of guarantee, though they do have a long public cloud track record of not turning stuff down.
You make a lot of additional good points about why these Google products are safe.
I'm not convinced I'd put Domains in that list, and for G Suite and GCP I'd only put the core services (G Suite jargon) and GA offerings (GCP jargon). Plus some other services under those umbrellas if Google has told you something about their plans under NDA, which they do for many customers.
But Google reliably provides transition plans and data exports if they do turn anything down, and I expect that will continue.
(Disclosure: I formerly worked for Google and GCP in particular, but no more recently than early 2015 and I have no current insider info.)
AWS likely doesn't have because they don't have the same trust problem Google does. Google likely were loosing from GCP deals because of this, so they put it in there to appease customers.
One year is way too short as well. Enterprise application development does not happen at that speed . Teams and budgets are not readily available to start migration to something equivalent just coz Google felt like it.
Even if that's not a problem migration may not even possible with proprietary APIs. You may have to deprecate entire fearures. If your SLA is longer and reasonable time to your customers, you are screwed.
Hell, I bet there are insiders who were surprised about the decision to close up shop on Google Inbox. There's no guarantee that Cloud and Domains will never be closed, but that's on the level of RIM no longer making Blackberries. Google's a modern Internet company and has bet, and bet big, on being a leading cloud services provider, and Domains are a key component to having a vertically integrated offering.
Google is a public company and as such they are required to release certain information in annual report, so their investment in the cloud is verifiable.
> Hell, I bet there are insiders who were surprised about the decision to close up shop on Google Inbox.
Not an insider, but TBH, I was always pretty much sure that one of Gmail or Inbox will go away soon. With Gmail having more user base, it was natural for Inbox to be subsumed by gmail.
Inbox was not really fundamentally different from Gmail. It offered some new features, but I can't imagine that it would be too hard to implement them in Gmail too (e.g., snooze feature).
I suspect Inbox was never meant to survive. It had small details that prevented mass adoption. For instance, it took them months after launch to implement an automatic signature, and then they added the artificial restriction to only allow them in your gmail.com account, not other accounts like in gmail. This prevented a lot of people whose workplace policy requires a specific signature, me included, from completely ditching gmail.
That article mentions that bundles are supposed to arrive in Gmail soon. My point still stands that Inbox features would be not-so-difficult to add to Gmail.
It's much easier than developing and maintaining 2 apps, and testing them on variety of platforms (Web, ios, android etc.) and device/browser combinations.
