Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 99 posts

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#81

Post by asciimike »

fpgaminer wrote: post #45
mimming wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear things are more difficult. I'd love to hear specifics, if you're interested in sharing. I'd love to try to get them fixed :) And yeah, I'm a developer advocate on GCP

It's a thousand paper cuts scenario; nothing big and specific, just running into little problems constantly. Honestly, that's worse than running into big problems. It makes us go from trying to accomplish what should be a simple change, to spending three hours hammering an API with random combinations of inputs to find the magical incantation that makes it work correctly. Some examples: Cloud Storage doesn't support…

Totally hear you on the death by a thousand tiny cuts :(

GCS provides multi-part and resumable uploads (https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/how-tos/up...), though I agree that the docs make it hard to find given how deeply they are nested. We use resumable uploads in Firebase Storage (mobile GCS: firebase.google.com/docs/storage) to great effect, and routinely upload some pretty huge files with no problems.

Definitely hear you on autogenerated libs sucking: the gcloud-* libs are designed to address some of those issues. gcloud-golang is still under development (https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/gcloud-golang), but might be a good place to start.

GCP is working to address a number of permissions issues with Cloud IAM (https://cloud.google.com/iam), which will provide more fine grained control over resources. I believe Cloud PubSub already uses this model.

Firebase (which shares certain services with GCP) has free developer support (firebase.google.com/support), and as you can imagine, we're inundated with questions and have two teams working 24/7 to address them. Free developer support is a great thing for developers, but providing high quality support at Google scale is probably the hardest thing to do--people just don't scale the same way machines do.

That's why so many of us are active on social media/HN/etc., we want to talk directly to developers and get feedback so we can improve our products, but we typically aim for high quality feedback (like this, thank you :), where we can engage with savvy developers to solve their problems, or at least get actionable feedback to guide our roadmap (x is a bad experience, have you considered y and z which would save me n hours). Ideally, this feedback trickles down into all areas of the product, and even across products (when it comes to permissions, console changes, docs, etc.), though it can take some time to implement those changes.

(Disclosure: PM on Firebase, and work closely with Cloud)

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#82

Post by shostack »

eitally wrote: post #66
shostack wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a heavy Excel user, Sheets just doesn't compare in many ways. Even for basic things such as pivot tables. The interface is just painful, and you flat out can't do certain things. I really with that team would bring it up to feature parity similar to how Marissa Mayer grabbed everything she could from AdWords in terms of features and UI design.

And Sheets isn't aimed at Excel power users. It's just that Excel is seen as a niche tool in the same way Photoshop or a programming IDE would be. I think that's fairly reasonable.

I consider things like pivot tables to be more mainstream and not relegated to just power users.

So the statement I responded to:

>"Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google."

...is just not accurate. Not to mention other super basic things like a lot of the formatting options, etc. Those most certainly are basic user needs, and you can't do half the formatting things you can do in Excel.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#83

Post by brianx »

boulos wrote: post #18
manigandham wrote: post #2

Interesting article. For anyone working with Google's Cloud Platform, there are definitely changes happening both in product and culture. As a company that's used all the major clouds and vendors out there (AWS, Azure, Softlayer, GCP, Internap), Google's has been the best so far with simple fast tech that works. They are clearly behind in features and breadth of offering but I agree with Diane's statements that the u…

Whom would you like to reach? (sounds like PMs and/or engineers). I'd consider it okay that you ping me and I route your issues to the relevant folks (there's always going to be routing), but for existing customers most questions naturally should go through support (either directly or via requests from Sales when a customer contacts them). Are you an active customer who is having trouble reaching us? Or a prospective…

We are currently considering going with Google Cloud but were not sure if it's going to be any better then other company's offerings.

Apparently Urs has an OKR to become the top 2nd cloud provider. This tells me Google has accepted the fact they can't compete with AWS and are fighting for second place against the likes of Microsoft.

We follow you're miniclusters project and have noticed that you just finished the deployment of your Japan site. Which other locations are you going to cover in the near future?

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#84

Post by Gravityloss »

SystemOut wrote: post #34
willvarfar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google docs hasn't moved forward since it was first released. Its as feature poor as ever. The style of charts is so bland it has a java applet in a myspace page feel to it. There are no multi-column layouts. Some things can be created offline, but not drawings etc. Recent Powerpoint on the desktop is just lightyears better at animation. The Office 365 nonsense lags behind - it can view, but not create, the fancy ani…

I'm not sure if you're saying you think that Google doesn't use Docs, Sheets, etc inside of Google but that is the entire opposite of what is happening. Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google. There really isn't any other option available. Disclosure: I work at Google

Maybe Google doesn't really need to create sales presentations. It's really hard to get good looking stuff out of Docs or Slides.

    Importing vectors like .eps is not possible. 
    Creating a new document to a directory using your business template is impossible. 
    Copies of documents are created in root directory. Moving requires navigating in a tiny window without search. (Makes template usage even worse.)
    There are no small caps. 
    You can't load custom fonts.
    No log axis in Sheets. (There is histogram though so it's better than Excel!)
    No backups, no change management, easy to destroy whole google drive by one user dragging wrong. NOBODY SHOULD EVER DRAG ANYTHING.
It feels like an uneven product.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#85

Post by TheIronYuppie »

ktamura wrote: post #3

This is probably some kind of GCP PR's placed article, but regardless, Greene's impact on GCP has been incredible and highly visible. Previously, the standard arguments that I've seen in sales conversations were that GCP wasn't enterprise ready or serious enough. All of that disappeared in the last 6 months. Yes, GCP is still small compared to Google (or AWS) at $400M/yr revenue. Yes, AWS still "gets" enterprise bett…

I don't think we've discussed revenue anywhere, where did you get this number?

We'll certainly do our best!

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#86

Post by phonon »

zaroth wrote: post #68
phonon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make any sense. The deduction is in the same amount of the income she just received (I assume her basis (since she was a founder) was very low or near zero). It will not be available for "future income". The foundation-type entity is correct though, she will still be overseeing how it's spent.

No, that's just it! You donate the appreciated security directly without exercising/selling them first, so there is no recognized income on the personal tax return. Plus you still get to take the deduction on the fair market value of the security. See: http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-esta...

Ummm...the whole point is that she sold those shares to Google, donating large "paper profits" is a total other thing.

EDIT: Perhaps you're saying she donated her shares to the Donor Advised Fund first, and then the Fund sold the shares to Google? Possible I guess, but that's not what the SEC notice said.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316...

"Diane Greene exchanged 7,244,150 shares of bebop stock for 200,729 shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock at $740.39 each in the Merger, plus cash for fractional shares. Ms. Greene intends to donate the shares exchanged to a donor advised fund."

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#87

Post by ktamura »

TheIronYuppie wrote: post #85
ktamura wrote: post #3

This is probably some kind of GCP PR's placed article, but regardless, Greene's impact on GCP has been incredible and highly visible. Previously, the standard arguments that I've seen in sales conversations were that GCP wasn't enterprise ready or serious enough. All of that disappeared in the last 6 months. Yes, GCP is still small compared to Google (or AWS) at $400M/yr revenue. Yes, AWS still "gets" enterprise bett…

I don't think we've discussed revenue anywhere, where did you get this number? We'll certainly do our best! Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

Hi there,

This was my source: http://www.recode.net/2015/10/22/11619964/google-has-its-hea...

The # is from Oct 2015, so it's entirely possible that my number is very out of date. Couldn't figure out how to amend my original comment, so adding this one as a substitute.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#88

Post by jpatokal »

querulous wrote: post #37

google cloud seems like a repackaging of internal google services which is fine but most companies don't want to migrate existing code to google's homegrown tech. the story for running postgres, oracle, mssql, spark, hadoop, kafka, etc on google cloud is vastly inferior to the same on aws where they either offer it as a managed service or someone else has done and documented the work required to do it

Managed Spark & Hadoop = Cloud Dataproc https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/

One-click deploys for Kafka and Postgres: https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la..., https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la...

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#89

Post by frostmatthew »

p0rkbelly wrote: post #76

Not to get into a technical discussion of the merits between the two. But, I don't get the excitement around Diane Greene? Wasn't she asleep at the wheel at VMWare when AWS/MS were building out their cloud offerings? Seems like a major blunder and sitting on your laurels.

> Wasn't she asleep at the wheel at VMWare when AWS/MS were building out their cloud offerings?

She left VMware in 2008, that's only two years after AWS launched and two years before Microsoft Azure. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight "cloud" seems like an obvious next step but I imagine it wasn't as clear in 2008ish - even Amazon didn't move its retail operation to AWS until two years later[1].

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/2011-aws-tour-au...

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#90

Post by zaroth »

phonon wrote: post #86
zaroth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's just it! You donate the appreciated security directly without exercising/selling them first, so there is no recognized income on the personal tax return. Plus you still get to take the deduction on the fair market value of the security. See: http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-esta...

Ummm...the whole point is that she sold those shares to Google, donating large "paper profits" is a total other thing. EDIT: Perhaps you're saying she donated her shares to the Donor Advised Fund first, and then the Fund sold the shares to Google? Possible I guess, but that's not what the SEC notice said. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316... "Diane Greene exchanged 7,244,150 shares of bebop…

Getting past my 'expertise' in this area, but she didn't personally sell her shares to Google. Her company was acquired by Google, and her shares in bebop were exchanged for shares of Alphabet. A merger/stock exchange is not a taxable event, she would keep her near-$0 basis in the now Alphabet Class C shares, and then donate the highly appreciated Alphabet shares to the Fund.

You have to structure the deals this way, otherwise you lose more than half of your company to the government. When marginal rates exceed 50% and you have dependable future earning potential, yes, giving away unrealized gains can be worth more than realizing them.

Post reply on HN