May 21, 2026
I thought Google owning the full vertical stack was a masterstroke. Like TSMC silicon, TPU, their own data centers, proprietary models, search engines. Who else has it?? nobody. I thought it was an unbeatable fortress.
I was absolutely wrong.
View Railway GCP Account Ban Status. There are literally billion dollar startups running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account representative. Poof. Went. This is real madness to me. A billion dollar customer gets the same automated middle finger as a low-effort spam bot. If this is how you treat people, your B2B business is all set. The enterprise cloud gravy train is right there and Google is standing on the tracks begging to be hit by the train.
And even B2C or indie developers aren’t saving them. You can actually get better, faster hosting for less money at Hetzner or OVH or a dozen other places. GCP is stuck in this weird, dead middle where large enterprises don’t trust them due to random automated restrictions and regular people find them too expensive and complicated. So what is the point?
Google kills literally everything. Reader, Hangouts, Stadia, Inbox, Plus. The cemetery is huge. Now no one gets excited when they announce something new. Virtually everyone starts counting down to the announcement of the funeral. You can’t build trust with users when you act like a serial killer of your own software applications.
And search is now completely useless. He built an entire empire from our stuff. Bloggers, old forums, niche sites. We were the first to make the web searchable. Now their AI observations scrape our exact answers, remove the hyperlinks, and repackage it in a blue box without linking back. They came into our house, ate all our food and did not even introduce us to their friends. It’s the perfect vibe.
YouTube is also eating itself from the inside out. Everyone hates the monetization thing, but low-effort AI slope content really kills it for me. YouTube gained widespread popularity because it had real creators. supply and demand. A real market. But if you keep removing genuine suppliers and replacing them with low-effort garbage, virtually anyone can host that garbage. The gap disappears completely. TikTok has already proved this.
Android is a whole different level of betrayal. I was a staunch Android guy because it seemed open. Sideloading, choices, freedom. ReCAPTCHA now demands an actual phone number, sideloading gets harder every year, and they’re basically making a worse version of iOS but with awesome vibes. And G Suite?? They deliberately broke the UI scrollbars so you can’t find the unsubscribe button. That’s not a bug. That is an option.
IBM’s point of view is becoming impossible to ignore. People said IBM was too big to fail. It was not. It gradually, then suddenly became completely irrelevant. Google feels exactly the same way right now. Not a major accident. Just a slow deflation. The fun indie engineering energy is completely gone. What’s left feels corporate and desperate and kind of sad.
Eric Schmidt was recently humiliated on stage. Eric Schmidt! The guy who was basically at Google for a decade. It’s not just your brand that suffers when your own alumni are mobbed. It is poisonous. And that toxicity hasn’t yet shown up on quarterly earnings. But it makes you hollow from inside. The words spoken die. The cult following disappears. You become a giant shell that still moves money around but no one really cares.
Apple did a somewhat better job here. If you don’t have anything good to invest, just buy back your stock. Stay safe. Listen to what people really want (like cheap MacBooks that don’t sound like jet engines). This is incredibly boring. But that doesn’t make your entire user base actively hate you.
Google chased every shiny object. Now AI search with sponsored slots. Linus called him. They are squeezing the last little drops of juice from a tired lemon while their actual original product is rotting in the sun.
Don’t know whether they are falling up or down. Maybe the advertising monopoly money will keep them going forever. Probably not. But owning the entire stack only makes sense if you can still build something that people will actually want to use. Right now Google builds things like a digital slumlord. Functional, extractive, cool. Vertical monopoly was considered their ultimate superpower. Instead it is just dead weight. And they are breaking under it.
Anyway this has been a huge source of frustration for me because I really used to like Google, but so good for “don’t be evil”.
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