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Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

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Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law says that you must give free consent . Saying "we'll track you or else... (go away / pay up)" is arguable not free. It doesn't really matter though because literally nobody it enforcing this part of the GDPR.

I believe people have gotten pretty good about auto accepting anything, in no small part due to the 'hey, just wanted to let you know we use cookies, like every other website on the planet!'. But if people really did overwhelmingly say no, I just see no way for most of the internet to exist. You get overwhelmingly less per click/impression for 'dumb ads,' and news sites have already had to resort to click bait today.…

I think the internet would stay much the same as it is now. Companies would simply be breaking the law. As a side effect, I think they'd be more willing to do other illegal things too, such as straight up selling your data. They're already breaking the law after all.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#92
post #43

Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.

Energy usage and compute amount are company secrets that they simply won't discuss in the open.

All of these vendors will brag about their pue and energy sourcing. Nobody will tell you their electric bill, because it’s meaningless to you and meaningful to competitors.

Google regularly brags about their facilities and you can find info with 30 seconds of research. AWS is a little more cagey, they will brief customers. Microsoft is more like Google.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#93

Article is missing the point. Growth is not the hardest problem in a fast-growing market. The real question is whether they're growing faster than their competitors, and that's unlikely.

Do you mean in terms of revenue dollars growth, revenue percent growth? Total number of customers growth? Growth amongst solo devs? Growth amongst fortune 500? There are many ways to look at this

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is Azure AD counted?

Where should it be counted and why wouldn’t it be counted as Azure revenue just like AWS offers Microsoft AD?

It’s a good question, because Azure AD is a part of O365, and is part of the M365 bundle of bundles.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#95
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cloud provider that specializes in compute will have vastly higher energy costs than a cloud provider that specializes in storage. Even without explicit specialization, it's not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of compute-heavy and storage-heavy customers is quite different between providers. So you'd have to sort of calculate that out. But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them…

Cooling is a pretty big factor in the energy usage of datacenters, and there's a lot of room for creative use of technology there - or simply geographic advantages.

It's a lot smaller than you think these days with all the effort that has gone into it.

Google reports an average PUE[1] of 1.11 over the past year, 1.09 over the past quarter, and the latest/best data centers are at 1.06 [2]. In simple terms this means that the total power overhead for cooling etc is just 6% of that to power the machines in them.

Google (and others) have gone to great lengths using AI, and radical new ideas for cooling.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in Datacenters. All info public domain

[1] Definition of PUE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness

[2] Source: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#96
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you mean by publish “what the power sources are.” Data centers are grid connected and are therefore connected to a lot of different generators—including coal, natural gas, wind, solar, and hydro. All generators on the grid contribute to the grid. It’s really tough to single out a generation source for a particular user.

I remember walking by a google data centre on the Columbia river years ago and being told that it was sighted there so that it could use the power from the dam.

Or for water cooling the CPUs?

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#97
Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down.

Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform.

Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important though.

Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause they’ll shut it down.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#98
post #96
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember walking by a google data centre on the Columbia river years ago and being told that it was sighted there so that it could use the power from the dam.

Or for water cooling the CPUs?

Personally, I don’t understand carbon neutrality. How deep does this rabbit hole go? If Google only buys and uses fully electric cars for street view and use only solar and wind to power them is that good enough? Does the manufacture of the car, batteries, solar panels also have to be carbon neutral? If not, can a company become carbon neutral by simply letting another company do the dirty work?

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#99
post #97

Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down. Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform. Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being importa…

My pipedream theory about that is that Google has an AI for modeling Alphabet. If the service was normal (not that terrible), google cloud would be such a success that there would be a trial for monopoly and Alphabet would be crushed. My theory is that google tries to ensure it will earn a lot of money as long as possible and this means not killing the golden goose by being too greedy or too dominent on a market.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#100
post #97

Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down. Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform. Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being importa…

Google was the natural “winner” of the cloud computing game.

Google has internet in its DNA it never did anything else but internet.

But it failed to see the opportunity in the first place.

Secondly I attribute its lack of customer service to its recruiting and hiring practice.... it only ever hired the most geeky of geeky academics.

And geeky academics are the opposite of human relationship oriented.

Thus everyone at google designed the company to avoid human contact.

And that surely the complete opposite of customer service.

Google has the inverse of good customer service DNA... it has “hide from and avoid customer contact” DNA.

And that’s what has sunk the google cloud. $10B might sound like a lot, but to me it sounds like a gigantic fail.

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