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Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

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Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#171

Post by 0xfaded »

bad_user wrote: post #84
keerthiko wrote: post #70

I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that familiar with cloud tools that are significantl…

Google has lost much of the trust developers placed in them, first of all by terminating products some of us loved [1] and also by terminating user accounts in an automated fashion with no way to appeal. Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decis…

Just want to +1 to being automatically banned by google and therefore not choosing GCP, because this is exactly what happened to me.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#172

Post by hibikir »

mrweasel wrote: post #88
keerthiko wrote: post #70

I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that familiar with cloud tools that are significantl…

Capturing startups seems like a gamble, compared to Microsofts strategy of just forklifting customer that already known and trust them into Azure. And at this point IBM is basically starting from scratch. You have to be an enormous company, with existing IBM contracts to even consider them a cloud provider. They also made a mistake with Watson and focusing too much on that one product. Right now it's hard to see that…

It's actually the opposite: If you are building an infrastructure company, you are far better off chasing startups than large enterprise companies. Microsoft just has an overwhelming advantage for them in the cloud: The fact that they are already using their services outside the cloud.

I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something, but selling to startups is relatively easy: They are starting from almost zero, so making changes and trying new things is cheap. When selling to enterprise can be a one or two year process, you can get a startup to sign up in an hour.. and that's if they don't just discover your product and sign up without sales!

But the real kicker here is that if your product bills more to larger companies for good reasons (like, say, you bill by the server, or by the transactions they process), then their growth is your growth, without needing more sales. Fortune 500 companies that aren't cloud providers themselves aren't going to grow fast at all. And while some startups fail, the ones that don't make up for that loss: You get a lot of baseline growth without having to grow your sales team. And if you do catch a future unicorn or two, you will then get to understand large company needs from an existing company, instead of having to waddle through complicated sales processes.

Amazon didn't start selling their cloud offering to Fortune 500 companies either: Those came around many years later, and in practice rely on hiring people that are familiar with the technology. Unless you have some sales gimmick that works really well with large companies (and nowadays, neither Google or IBM have one), getting startups, and a wide array of individuals that get practice on their offerings for free on their spare time, is the best way to go, and it's not even close.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#173

Post by StreamBright »

sigfubar wrote: post #170
StreamBright wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal evidences are great. It is not an accident that GCP and Azure storage service has a S3 API and not the other way around. https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-az...

S3 API compatibility is there because creators of open source "data engineering" tools have in the early days rushed to develop their tools around the S3 API. I can make the case that the need for a properly abstracted storage layer should have been obvious, but in that early gold rush no one would have listened to such reason. Nowadays vendors are stuck shipping S3 compatibility layers in order to avoid locking out…

Not at all. It is there because AWS's S3 became the defacto solution for storage and because they were first AND also because of popularity and how well it works.

Your Oracle example is flawed for many reasons. SQL standard pre-dates Oracle and I am not even sure what you mean by every RDBMS client got written in Oracle's wire protocol. Ingres also predates Oracle. Are you implying that S3 API is there because they were the first? Nothing else?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)#Early_histor...

SQL standard:

Developer ISO/IEC First appeared 1974; 45 years ago

Oracle first release: Oracle v2 2.3 1979

And also, it is allowed and trivial to implement S3 APIs because it is well documented and available for anybody. You are also implying that S3 API is not a "properly abstracted storage layer"?

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#174

Post by chiph »

Ginni Rometty was on Bloomberg the other day saying that Hybrid Clouds are a trillion dollar business and that IBM intends to be #1 in the market.

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-hybrid...

I'm more than a little skeptical on their ability to execute on this, given that they've let a lot of their top-talent go.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#175

Post by FakeComments »

0xfaded wrote: post #171
bad_user wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has lost much of the trust developers placed in them, first of all by terminating products some of us loved [1] and also by terminating user accounts in an automated fashion with no way to appeal. Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decis…

Just want to +1 to being automatically banned by google and therefore not choosing GCP, because this is exactly what happened to me.

The difference between Microsoft and Google is when Microsoft autokilled my account, it was only three days of chasing support people to fix it. Neither is good, but there’s degrees to the awfulness.

That’s a big difference when it comes to actually doing business.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#176

Post by PaulHoule »

Oracle's cloud efforts are just a footnote even when compared to the "IBM Cloud". If Google thinks hiring somebody from Oracle is going to solve their problems, they are delusional.

They'd be better off picking somebody at random from one of the flyover states then sticking to the monoculture.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#177

Post by Tor3 »

spricket wrote: post #94
politelemon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely anecdotally speaking - at a few enterprises, convincing customers to make use of GCP has been an uphill battle. I notice deep misgivings regarding the support timescales, and even for supported products, poor support in general (ymmv+++). GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they w…

Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, before they cloned most of AWS). Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it. We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies…

> 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.

It's not enough to finish writing the requirements. One of our customers won't touch anything unless 15 years of support is guaranteed. And that's what they get.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#178

Post by mancerayder »

aqwsedopl wrote: post #150
godzillabrennus wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us not forget the Google Maps price bump still fresh in everyone’s mind. That was a kind way of reminding customers that Google isn’t serious about cloud. Amazon costs go down routinely. Google costs go up or the services go away.

Microsoft’s bias towards windows stunted it’s growth severely. It seems googles bias towards its ad-revenue based models is something similar. Specifically, googles inability to adopt a customer-service oriented mindset and customer-privacy will be its end. Is search really it’s core strength anymore? I’d think it’s more it’s ability to reindex in a day and filter out spam. Fundamentally, as long as google offers fre…

Specifically, googles inability to adopt a customer-service oriented mindset and customer-privacy will be its end. Is search really it’s core strength anymore? I’d think it’s more it’s ability to reindex in a day and filter out spam.

I thought the core business was vacuuming up personal data for ad-targeting resale purposes?

I would love for them to actually a nicer tech company that offers services like GCP and leaves the rest of us alone. Cynically, one wonders how the idea made it past a whiteboard in a meeting, where probably someone was very interested in how they could do some ML on the data coming in and out. Not saying they do (or even could) do this, only that this seems the core business model.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#179

Post by ohaideredevs »

spricket wrote: post #87

The reason for IBM's failure is pretty obvious. Their old school bare-metal servers at Softlayer are a good value, but the need for bare metal is decreasing with IO improvements like SR-IOV and real hardware level virtualization (ex HVM on AWS). I've also heard IBM is running that division into the ground. Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure out how much my server would cost. T…

"cute shitty documentation" - reading the GCP docs has been nothing but a pleasure for me. I genuinely hate most documentation (I am looking at you Microsoft), but GCP is up there in quality, almost standing next to MDN.

Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious.

As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps and debugging them is a pain. Sometimes the function doesn't load at all when you change one thing, etc.

AWS was a bit of a better experience, and I think almost everyone knows what "S3" is. That is to say that AWS immediately springs to mind when you need to store BLOBs.

I have also read about people having a lot of problems with GCPs BigQuery - infrequent, but random downtimes with support not being able to figure out the issue.

Edit: As someone else said below - I do agree that all Google's services have a clear use, whereas AWS and Azure tend to have a lot that you just kind of ignore.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#180

Post by Brahma111 »

asciimike wrote: post #143
Brahma111 wrote: post #47

I am not surprised for IBM but Google could do a heck of a better job if they treated their customers a bit better. They suddenly make changes to their policies and don't care a bit while discontinuing services who don't update their products. I had two very bad experience with Google. The first was when Firebase was still a niche and we built our product on top of it. Then they made an update where certain features…

Early Firebase PM here: which feature was this? I don't remember us making decisions where things abruptly stopped working, but please let me know what happened and I'll take a look.

Thanks for getting back. How can I reach you? I can send you the details. We were not even in the free tier. But for some reason after having our credit card information for close to 6 months, it was disabled since some more information was suddenly asked. I agree that some of it might be legal. But for heaven's sake don't automate the hell out everything
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