Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you been following Google?
Closely yes. But I think even the idea of retiring is insane. This is not any free customer facing product. The impact is totally different.
You mean like Google Fiber?
Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
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Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#142If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I'm afraid something will go wrong and I won't be able to talk to a human. I've heard so many stories about the "stone wall" that is Google customer support. Also, I'm afraid the rug will get pulled out from under me if I decide to go all in given their history of axing project…
You're confusing Google customer support for their free consumer products (nonexistent) with support for paid services. Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure. Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas. I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near Apple's ex…
If your company has a widespread perception to have some of the worst support in the industry you have a problem, even if that perception isn't entirely accurate in all cases.
Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#143What is funny is the link reads as "google-reportedly-wants-to-be-top-two-player-in-cloud-by-2023.html"
Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#144AWS is unassailable as number one, but Azure is more fragile than they might appear in their #2 position. They use their Office online revenue to boost their numbers (EDIT: apparently they don't do that anymore), and their utilization is probably lower than the competition because they rely heavily on bundling new cloud services into legacy contracts at renewal to reach their targets. So lots of Office / Outlook / AD / Windows Server customers are getting hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars worth of Azure that they’re not using, but count against their revenue number anyway.
On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of the three.
What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead.
I think if Google were to get serious about communicating focus and dedication to their cloud business (the opposite of what they’re doing now), they could conceivably catch up to Microsoft.
Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#145GCP is more customizable/better for edge cases of power users, but AWS is better for something like 90% of users
Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just spitballing: what if they rented compute based on sandboxed access to the huge trove of behavioral and activity data they have on their users (which amounts to everyone who uses the web)? It would be the ultimate differentiator. The only potential competitor would be Facebook, who doesn’t offer cloud services.
It's next to impossible to do this at scale while maintaining user privacy. There are some differential privacy techniques which might help, but so far they're rather hard to use and there is no tooling for such things.
The United States has no data protection laws to speak of (over this kind of data). Renting/selling access to run queries over this sort of data is entirely legal. All it
would take is another half dozen years of our society continuing to move in the direction it has already on privacy.
It may just be de jure legal though; I bet it would be shown to be de facto illegal once people started mining data from federal judges and legislators...
Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a ridiculous interpretation. If Jeff Bezos sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023" would you assume that they'd shutter the whole thing if they didn't meet that goal? Of course not. Why is a goal and strategy for Google treated differently?
Google has a well established track record of killing things that aren't working out.
I wouldn’t say that, they also kill things that are working out.
Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#148I can't imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that's already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when they'll abandon cloud. How could anyone in their right mind start building on GCP? They may as well shut it down today.
How about the leak where they were debating killing it off?
Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#149I'm astounded that they would seriously consider closing GCP after committing so much time, money, and effort into building it. Every time there's a GCP story on HN commenters say "I won't use it because Google can just pull the plug." I thought this opinion was silly as GCP is the #3 cloud provider in the world, not a free service like Reader. Guess I was wrong, nothing is safe. Google wants #1 or nothing at all.
However tempting (and it is very tempting), how much they’ve already spent should never figure in this kind of decision (aka the sunk cost fallacy). What matters is the return they will get from future commitments.
That fallacy sunk the Desertron after many years of cost overruns...
Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
#150Well this is one way to kill your cloud business. Even a hint that execs were considering or debating this move is enough to kill any serious company's interest in GCP. Why would you ever consider GCP over AWS/Azure knowing that the Google scythe could kill it at any time, with your suspicions confirmed by a leak this? Bonkers.
It's so stupid that they've got this reputation now. A lot of the things they've killed could've instead been sold/spun off instead. Shutting down successful services that are not successful enough by Google's standards has given them a bad rep at the same time as destroying value. Reader could've been a successful company on its own for sure, for example. I wasn't a user of it, but there was enough people who loved…
I think google builds stuff in a way where it depends on the google stack. That makes it harder to spin off or sell, as you'd basically have to re-write it.