> A senior Google leader telling the shareholders "we've asked 1% of our engineers, that's 270 people, costing $80M/year, to work on services that produce no revenue whatsoever." I don't think it would pass that well.
The business case for this is that Google lose a bunch of money in b2b (cloud mostly, potentially AI in future) because professional users (developers etc) don't believe that products will be supported. Every time Google shut down a service like this, this perception is re-inforced. We're investing this money into these services to change our brand perception and help us make more money in future.
As a bonus, this kind of cultural change would also force them to rebuild their engineering systems (and promotional systems) to make this easier. This may not have mattered for Search/Ads but it will matter if they actually care about winning in cloud and AI.
The business case for this is that Google lose a bunch of money in b2b (cloud mostly, potentially AI in future) because professional users (developers etc) don't believe that products will be supported. Every time Google shut down a service like this, this perception is re-inforced. We're investing this money into these services to change our brand perception and help us make more money in future.
As a bonus, this kind of cultural change would also force them to rebuild their engineering systems (and promotional systems) to make this easier. This may not have mattered for Search/Ads but it will matter if they actually care about winning in cloud and AI.