This company Nominal (nominal.io) just raised $80M at a $1B+ valuation for hardware engineering data infrastructure. That alone is interesting. But what caught my eye is they released a physical product catalog styled after McMaster-Carr. Square-back binding, industrial aesthetic, the whole thing. It's a software company shipping a paper catalog in 2026.
Their product helps hardware teams (aerospace, defense, automotive) manage test and operational data. Think time series, video, structured metadata across massive test campaigns. Customers like Anduril and Hermeus are using it.
But honestly I'm just here for the catalog. Someone over there clearly cares about the craft of how engineering tools get presented to the world. The website has a similar retro-industrial vibe. Feels like a throwback to when instrument companies like Tektronix and HP actually had taste.
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Some invest it themselves into real estate, both in their own country (like highest towers, most fancy hotel, palm tree shaped islands) and abroad (skyscrapers and office buildings in various financial structures).
They're really setting themselves up for them and their future generations to remain rich and comfortable for the forseeable future even when oil dries up or demand goes down.
If Google began to charge for their services, at least there would be a way out. If a single market telecom raised prices or change policies, there isn't any real recourse.
I wonder if the standard for excessive profits truly measures profit and not simply price increases and deceptive service charges.
If it is the later I can say I have definitely been harmed by cost cutting measures related to quality of service within telecom. Contractors who don't have enough training and are overworked have completely supplanted full time personnel who know their company's product and can provide competent support.
The updates take the entire instance down for 2-5 minutes each month. While you can't avoid them, they can be scheduled for particularly low traffic times. If you're trying to avoid downtime, its a giant PIA. Even with HA enabled, you still lose master, slave and read replicas. Not entirely sure what they define HA as, but a mandatory monthly downtime doesn't usually fit into mine.
[Update]
That said, from what I understand, they have a road map to maintaining read replicas and queued writes. Not sure what the date on it is though.
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] I can't comment on timelines, but we're aware that customers are interested in more features around maintenance window scheduling, deferral, and notification, as well as shorter downtime for updates and smarter scheduling within a group of replicas.
[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] Confirmed. We know it's a problem that we need to fix. HA reduces downtime in unexpected failure cases (live migration for your primary only helps in planned shutdown cases, not if the physical machine fails), but doesn't currently help with maintenance-related downtime.
I wouldn't say they're risking nothing. Sure, they're not shutting down existing offices and removing themselves from markets, but they probably walked away from money they wont get back. I'm sure there were legal fees, plus people they might have already begun to recruit. So yes, its not a large risk, but its not like it didn't come at a loss for them.
Local Charlotte paper kind of agrees, it would be interesting to see companies pull out of places like China and Saudi Arabia, given the investment that has been made already, and the loss of growth that would come from that.
Essentially, the company would have to put social issues as a priority over being competitive, because I can assure you that someone else with lower morals would take that business. Would be a very hard stance for companies to take with share holders.
I feel products like this - http://www.vtechphones.com/products/product_detail/1673 - (just an example) are a better solution to this problem. You dont need a land line subscription, just a cell phone with bluetooth.
When my parents get home, their cell phones pair to the home phone, so when they receive a call, the home phone rings. They don't have to carry around cell phones, and they can place calls through their cell phones using the handsets. Seems complicated at first, but saved headache and $$ in the end.
I think the major selling point is that you're not SOL if you need to be reached or call 911 while your cell is dead/left in the car/etc.
Not that it's an important enough point for me personally to have a land line, but I can understand why a lot of people would favor that. As a $10/month add-on for existing Fiber customers it's not a bad deal.
Their product helps hardware teams (aerospace, defense, automotive) manage test and operational data. Think time series, video, structured metadata across massive test campaigns. Customers like Anduril and Hermeus are using it. But honestly I'm just here for the catalog. Someone over there clearly cares about the craft of how engineering tools get presented to the world. The website has a similar retro-industrial vibe. Feels like a throwback to when instrument companies like Tektronix and HP actually had taste.