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

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

theinformation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 856 posts

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

#731

Post by hinkley »

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…

Microsoft’s culture didn’t change one little bit until after they started having trouble recruiting.

I doubt Google will learn anything until most people stop thinking a Google job is the best of all outcomes.

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

#733

Post by Lammy »

dwaite wrote: post #725
manigandham wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. The markets are entirely different, and ascribing the fate of Google Reader as a sign of anything on the B2B front doesn't make sense.

> Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. They may have different revenue models, but there is little difference when it comes down to management killing services which aren't profitable. If there is a difference, it is that Reader could be maintained at little cost, while GCE (when it gets the axe) could potentially be costing google hundreds of millions per year to keep running. There h…

To be fair, the switch to mobile-first did more to kill XMPP than Google did. It's a lot better now a decade later with all the XEPs, but now there's nobody there to talk to so it's too late.

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

#734

Post by hvidgaard »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #679
bigiain wrote: post #616

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…

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

I have no experience with Google support, let alone GCP support. But what I've heard both from inside and from customers, is that unless someone happen to want to help you with your specific problem, it can be a bit of hit or miss situation to get help. Maybe it's different with now GCP, but until I hear first hand experience telling me otherwise, I'm not even considering moving our cloud business to GCP.

We're running production systems making a significant amount of of our revenue, and when, not if, shit hits the fan we need someone with intimate knowledge of the internals to give us undivided attention until it's resolved.

Sometimes it's because we fucked up, sometimes it's the perfect storm of internals working unexpected - all of the time our systems are not working and our customers depend on them for their daily work.

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

#735

Post by akerro »

prepend wrote: post #347
mrosett wrote: post #15

I 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.

Maybe this helps GCP as the leak now makes this reputational for GOOG. They’ll have to keep it running to prevent people leaving because of the leak so they’ll do something drastic like pledge 10 years of support or something. This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stu…

>pledge 10 years of support or something.

Totally gonna believe them

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

#736

Post by mkolodny »

manigandham wrote: post #585
mkolodny wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > The group [which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely It's sounds like shutting down GCP at some point is definitely a possibility.

Why does "talked about" mean so much but "eventually dismissed" mean nothing? Are you selectively reading this?

They're both meaningful. GCP still exists because they eventually dismissed the idea of shutting it down. But the fact that they discussed the idea means that shutting it down was a real possibility. I think it also means that if GCP's category position weakens out stays the same, they'll consider shutting it down again.

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

#737

Post by NotSammyHagar »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #646
adventured wrote: post #643

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…

Your comment really resonates with me. I worked at google for many years and I eventually got tired of exactly that. Inside the company we complained about all the problems they still have, canceling projects, no way to talk to a human not even paid support to talk about your whatever being turned off. It was really irritating.

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

#739

Post by prox »

BurritoAlPastor wrote: post #678
res0nat0r wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maybe they won’t kill it, but I ve had a number of times platform changes killed features I used. Thing is, with a company I pay for I can vote with my wallet. With Google it’s just sending a message and hoping it doesn’t end up in nullspace somewhere.

Google is just too big as a company, and if they replaced every human in it with drones no one would know the difference. There is no human face or point of contact or any accountability and it’s becoming a problem.

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

#740

Post by jacquesm »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #730
stingraycharles wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re describing is actually the sunken cost fallacy. It’s entirely reasonable to assume Google execs treat the investments as sunken costs that cannot be recovered with GCP, because they rationally should.

Counterpoint, rational Google execs can't keep their jobs after spending 7 years sinking $Bs/year into unrecoverable investments in a product they eventually shutter. Google+ didn't require new physical infrastructure, and the other "Google kills xyz" stories are about small fry stuff.

The 'small fry stuff' runs in the 100's of projects and that adds up, and not all of them are really small fry either.
Post reply on HN