Steve Yegge has been making this argument for years: when he left Google in 2018 after 13 years, his exit critique blamed risk aversion, politics, and competitor-chasing for the company losing its way (his 2018 departure essay). The new target is narrower but arguably more damaging — how Google deprecates its Cloud APIs, which lands on the exact product line that has trailed AWS and Azure since the Diane Greene era and depends on developer trust to close that gap.
First-order effects
Developers with production workloads on deprecated Google Cloud APIs face unplanned migration work, and every such episode hands them evidence for the next vendor-selection conversation.
Second-order effects
AWS and Azure can weaponize the critique without saying a word — deprecation track record becomes a live differentiator in enterprise cloud RFPs where Google is already the challenger.
Third-order effects
The accumulation of insider critiques — Yegge's exit essay, Praveen Seshadri's reflections on the culture, the 2024 wave of current and former employees blasting leadership publicly (the January 2024 employee backlash) — risks hardening into a standing reputation problem that outlasts any individual product fix.
The trend: Google's competitive problem is shifting from missing features to eroded credibility, as a steady stream of insider critiques compounds the trust deficit in its enterprise businesses.
While it's true that this can be efficiently summarized as “platforms should not deprecate APIs” - you're missing all the fun if you don't read the full @Steve_Yegge rant https://medium.com/...
This Yegge-long article on the merits of backward compatibility is on point. I have felt this as both a user and a builder. I know I don't trust google at all any more. Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You https://medium.com/... https://twitter.com/...
having spent about 5 hours off and on this last week trying to fix a @googlecloud app engine app to no avail (i migrated off google cloud and rebuilt it. stupid) this post really resonated https://medium.com/...
„I'll also give a shout-out to our friends in the Operating Systems business: Windows, Linux, NOT APPLE FUCK YOU APPLE, FreeBSD, and so on, for doing such a great job of backwards compatibility on their successful platforms." Such a beautiful rant. https://medium.com/...
Long, but worth reading. While it criticizes GCP, this is really the voice of someone trying to use your platform, and the pains platform vendors unleash on their users. We all have stories of software we can't migrate to the better API: https://medium.com/...
This article about backwards compatibility (BC) really resonated with me 👇 https://medium.com/... While jOOQ cannot reach the level of BC of the JDK, I always thought of BC as a core feature of a library like jOOQ. The temptation to break things is so high, so often.
„Instant Apps was a pretty dumb idea, though. You know why? Because it required you to rewrite and re-architect your application! As if people are just going to up and rewrite 2 million apps. I'm guessing Instant Apps was probably a Googler's idea." https://medium.com/...
This, by @Steve_Yegge, reminds me of conversations I've had with PMs asking for features in Chrome over the years: Q: Why should they wait for us to do it the “slow” way via the web platform? A: How much do they still want it to be there in a year? https://medium.com/...
Great post from @Steve_Yegge on the importance of backward compatibility: “even though AWS has hundreds more service offerings than GCP, Google's developer docs mention deprecation around 7x as often.” https://medium.com/...
There aren't many writers who can get me to read a 20 minute blog post about a platform I don't even use. In fact, Steve Yegge might be the only one. https://medium.com/...
This post looks relevant to recent C++23 debates in the company culture sense. https://medium.com/... (Aside: I'm in the camp of having decided to avoid Python for new things.)
“Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You” https://medium.com/... We use GC at work because some bits of it, like the App Engine, hit a sweet spot for us, but it really is a nonstop treadmill. If I could go back in time, I'd go for Heroku or Azure instead
Nailed by @Steve_Yegge: https://medium.com/... I was a very early GCP/GAE customer. One day I got the “drop whatever you're doing and migrate your stuff {we won't help you} else your bill will be 10x. You have 30 days” email. Nothing has changed since. ✅ AWS ✅ Azure ❌ GCP https:/…
it's very hard for any of us who considered them the gold standard of ... fuck, *everything*, but it's time we admit they pretty much are 4-quadrant shit show now https://twitter.com/...