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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

#671

Post by smoe »

gerash wrote: post #623
scarejunba wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was genuinely not a factor when we signed a 1E8 deal with GCP. What was a factor: (non-exhaustive) * Access to their developers for core services * Discounts available * Quality of support * Access Controls / Audit / Budgeting * Dev Tools around Infra * Future Roadmap Not one of us ever would have chosen the shutdown of Plus/Reader/Wave as a factor. As a startup we hard pivoted in order to succeed. No surprise t…

I agree that this seems to be a narrative that exists only inside the HN bubble. The fact that a multi million dollar business decision is being made not by running numbers and future roadmap but by one guy in the meeting saying "wait! they shuttered Reader, my favorite RSS reader. Oh no, these other guys killed Zune, my favorite music player. Wait a minute, don't tell me these are the same people who killed Firephon…

True. But not everyone works at a multi million dollar business. Many start using cloud platforms in small companies and side/school projects and build up knowledge from there which eventually affects bigger companies: "Hey! Should we use the platform most of our people are already familiar with, or the one Bob used for his 500 line hackathon app last weekend?"

I'm not actually worried much about the multi million dollar companies using Google Products because then they start actually caring about you. When I worked at a place that made them significant ad money, I got splendid sub hour support. But Google is among the most disrespectful companies towards smaller actors while still trying to get as much money out of them as possible I have ever interacted with. E.g. Just recently it took us 3 weeks, 5 chat support sessions and 2 interventions from their supposed expert team to get an inappropriate "customer photo" shot 4'000 km away from maps/search removed. Or the whole Youtube ContentID disaster, or getting forced into G+ just for them to close it, etc etc.

Don't think anyone really cares about 1-2 products being closed that they were using, it's just a lot a things that add up and changed the perception of the company quite a bit over the years.

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

#672

Post by res0nat0r »

QuinnyPig wrote: post #546
ogre_codes wrote: post #455

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…

This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…” Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.

The issue is that folks here think GCP is the same thing as Google Reader. That's absurd.

Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone.

GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly.

https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/google-data-center-nevada/

https://www.rgj.com/story/money/business/2019/02/13/google-i...

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

#673

Post by darkwizard42 »

exabrial wrote: post #662

Never used Google for anything important. You're cattle to Google. Their lack of customer support in literally every one of their offerings shows their approach to making money. They will shut you off in a heartbeat and you have no recourse except to email a bot. Ultimately your puny little shop doesn't matter to their bottom line.

They offer excellent customer support for GCP. I think you are conflating this with YouTube or other services.

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

#674

Post by mulmen »

Touche wrote: post #540
mulmen wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think the API mandate necessitated or created AWS then yes, you misunderstand that memo. The API memo simply mandated a service-oriented architecture. That can run on any compute and indeed predates AWS by several years. The origins of AWS are entirely unrelated, Amazon simply realized it was good at operating infrastructure. This led to the conception of offering infrastructure as a service. The initial AWS s…

I'm confused because on the one hand you say that their needs are very different and then on the other hand you say that they are using AWS. Another commenter also pointed out that they are using AWS. I think the only needs that are likely different are scale, so bigger instances, and the fact that they have a massive legacy infrastructure that can't be easily migrated off of. So that's pretty much what I would expec…

Amazon builds internal services on top of AWS. The services AWS sells are not Amazon internal services.

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

#675

Post by dragonsh »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #660
throwaway2048 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am not sure why you are saying Microsoft transformed, its still the same old one now trying to embrace Linux as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance.

Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience.

Microsoft didn't transform it's just that enterprises who hold up upgrading Windows and Office did so after windows 7 debacle to Windows 10. This is just cyclical uptick, not really transformation, its just lucky Nadella. The only good thing Nadella did is, didn't take any disastrous decision to thwart the uptick by embracing Linux and trying open source, by understanding that if it's not done Microsoft will go the IBM path to irrelevance.

In the process Microsoft having an old relationship with enterprises helped them to move some workloads to Azure even though it is an inferior service, by supporting Linux and showing commitment to it for financial gain not out of goodwill towards open source.

Still today Microsoft relevance on mobile is due to its office products, otherwise it is as good as irrelevant on mobile application and development front. It's alive on mobile just due to proprietary platform lock-in to .NET. Now made it open source to try to increase the share as it's not as useful given the rise of nodejs, Python, rust and other platforms.

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

#676

Post by 40four »

Why would they even care about ‘winning’ the cloud? To what end? Google is officially and advertising company, and the large majority of their revenue depends on it.

This strategy is working so well for them, I just don’t see why they would even care about grinding out a little extra market share in the cloud hosting space. Why? Maybe just to boost their ego?

Is it really worth it to them? Whatever comparatively small amount of extra revenue they squeeze out will still be dwarfed by the ad revenue. I imagine they will continue doing what they do.

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

#677

Post by umvi »

jerf wrote: post #371
nikanj wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one corner, I have the good experience of you, a semi-anonymous internet commentor. In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN. I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there…

Most of those Google support stories aren't about GCP, though. It's things like app support, or Gmail support, etc.

Well, maybe they should've called it "Alphabet Prism" or something and not "Google Cloud" so that it is set apart from their other product support in consumer's minds.

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

#678

Post by BurritoAlPastor »

res0nat0r wrote: post #672
QuinnyPig wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…” Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.

The issue is that folks here think GCP is the same thing as Google Reader. That's absurd. Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone. GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly. https://9to5g…

Agreed that Google isn’t going to announce one day that they’re going to demolish all the datacenters in 30 days, but that doesn’t mean that GCP has any guaranteed future either. If Google leadership decides to walk away from cloud hosting, it’ll come in the form of reallocated engineers, reduced headcount, smaller conferences, and a general transition to “maintenance mode”. (At which point it’s a corporate backwater and everyone who can transfer out will.)

But for companies picking a cloud platform tomorrow, that’s a fate as good as death! AWS and Azure won’t slow down development and new features, so a couple years after GCP stops being a priority, it’ll start also being a bad deal, and a couple years after that it’ll be a straight-up strategic liability. THAT is why anything other than full-throated support from Google leadership for indefinite GCP investment will lose them business.

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

#679

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

bigiain wrote: post #616
ximeng wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to billing for cloud services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.

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…

GCP has a free billing chat support open to every customer, big or small. It's open 24/7, they can reverse charges (although obviously you'll need a pretty solid justification for 4 figures), and they'll happily jump on a call if you ask them to.

https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/

https://console.cloud.google.com/support/chat

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

#680

Post by deboflo »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #660
throwaway2048 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Jeff Bezos in 2002:

“All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

Thank you; have a nice day!”

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

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