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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

#651
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People, me included, just remember Google doesn't support their products. I won't be arsed to consult a list of Google products and properties to see if this particular one is going to get support or not. If I buy something from Microsoft, I can contact Microsoft support. I don't have to roll the dice on it being actually supported by Microsoft, or only supported by other desperate users on an abandoned phpBB somewhe…

I don’t buy this claim that Microsoft has good support for all their products. If my Windows machine is running slow will Microsoft support help me? Why do my family members keep asking me for help with their computers if Microsoft support is so great? To me, the idea of getting good support on any consumer software is laughable, and has no bearing on Google.

Because there aren’t a lot of stories of businesses struggling to contact Microsoft over a product they’ve paid for. Yet every other month there’s an article on the front page of HN of some paying business struggling to reach Google and the only way to do it is to go viral on social media.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having said that, AWS also have a long track record of reversing charges where a dev fucked up and ran up a huge bill accidentally. I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived…

Ah yes the "try getting someone from Google on the phone" trope. I've used GCP at 2 different places. One with a 10k/month spend and another with closer to 200k/month and received the same level of service. In both instances I've had direct access to engineers to get shit fixed when needed, phone/email/gchat.

I've had a real person from AWS support proactively reach out to me because of some issue and I have a $1/month spend.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#653
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it could have been Google's competitor making up these stories so enterprise customers would stop and think before switching, it is also better for competitors's sales to pitch on the potential of a shuttered GCP, which you can tell full well if I was a sales I would be referencing this article. And it wouldn't matter of there wasn't even an ounce of truth there, Google's reputation on future roadmap, communicat…

> Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era. This. A thousand times this! Once hero of the 2000's, Google is turning into the villain; meanwhile Microsoft has embarked on their redemption storyline. Microsoft is a fantastic developer-centric company that has made their pla…

You've totally drunk the Kool-Aid. Microsoft is on a redemption storyline? Windows 10 is a complete shitshow and this will likely be the last windows machine I ever personally own. Meanwhile LibreOffice suits all my needs fine where MS Office used to stand as they slowly tried to strip away the concept of software ownership and move to SAAS. Nobody uses edge anymore and Xbox is a joke. Maybe they are hustling on the B2B side, since they seem to have skyrocketing profits somehow, but I have almost no faith in them as a consumer at this point.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#654

Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this topic. I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023. > said people with knowledge of the matter. As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw som…

I think that what you’re seeing here on HN is a big problem that Google has — they’ve eroded the trust that they once had.

Perception matters. When you see the lack of trust Google has vs Amazon and Microsoft, you know you have a problem — both companies have track records of less than trustworthy actions.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had a similar experience where I could email PMs and we even had Google forward deployed engineers on-site. The trouble is that their customer service is terrible. We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existe…

Cloud Dataflow is also vastly more expensive than using pyspark and Apache Beam is 10 times slower for most operations than Flink or Spark. I have to try the new flexible scheduling but DataFlow the last time I tried it 2 years ago was a massive rip off. Also DataPrep was amazing until you run the DataFlow pipeline it produces and a Have had good experiences once the data is in bigquery and bq keeps costs low. But la…

Oh wow thanks for the info! Had no idea Beam was that slow.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use. Google has lo…

Absolutely. I like GCP more than AWS or Azure, but I don't use it because I don't trust that individual services will be available long term. Meanwhile, AWS sends me emails about minor service changes that may affect me well over a year in advance. (MS has a reputation for long term support, but the Azure UI was just so terrible. Maybe they've changed it by now?)

> Maybe they've changed it by now?

I think they might have.

I used it about a year or two ago and remembered the UI as horrible. I then had to use it a few weeks ago and didn't have the same negative reaction I had the first time I used it.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#658
post #480
post #437

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Google could very well be a one hit wonder. Coming from someone who works at a company with one successful product and many failed ones: Maybe they are too wealthy to want a second success. Life is cozy.

In addition to search I'd say: - Gmail - Android (and Google Play) - Drive - Maps - Chromecast - Google Home - YouTube (+Premium) are super successful.

There's no evidence that YouTube is profitable[1]. In fact, there's no evidence any of this is profitable.

Android, Gmail, and Maps make money from ads, not from charging users directly. That makes them the same business as search.

Hardware businesses like Home and Chromecast usually aren't profitable, and Google (like Amazon) is likely using them to keep people in their ecosystem.

That leaves Drive, which might have some good margins, but they give it away for free to many users...

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/technology/youtube-financ...

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#659
The current issue with many cloud providers today is that they had designed all these fantastic features but then completely left it up to the customers to figure out new use cases on their own. They forgot that the majority of customers don't have much clue about the cloud let alone those advanced features, and cloud providers are sitting here complaining that they are running out of patience waiting for customers to get on board. Designing new features alone is not enough, they must also design the actual use cases to convince customers because most of them don't have any clue of how to actually turn those advanced cloud services into something more useful than just hosting. It's not a capability issue but rather it's a use case problem.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Satya Nadella could get Microsoft to move beyond its Windows-all-or-nothing pathology, someone in charge at Google (including the two founders that vote-control the entire company directly - they can de facto hand Sundar the power to act as he needs to) can trivially put a stop to the relationship commitment issues at Google.

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. From everything we have seen of Google's culture, working on new projects is exciting and is absolutely the way to get promoted. Doing maintenance work, especially on products that aren't wildly successful gets you no attention, no staff, no funding, and probably more than a little tongue waging. The CEO cant just change all that with directives, e…

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime.

You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THING on the the scale in which they did it your statement doesn't hold any water. Go back in time and walk onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle and tell anyone that will listen in say 1995, 1999, 2001, 2007, or 2012 that Windows licensing is a dead end and see if you don't get lumped in with the loonies talking about the end of the world.

To say that Google can't do it is more an indictment of Google's leadership as opposed to the enormity of the task. To thinking a company with a 934 billion dollar market cap (Alphabet) can't figure out how to do enterprise software support if it wanted to, what a joke.

Edit: spelling.

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