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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

#171

Post by whatitdobooboo »

lithos wrote: post #146
test1235 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that impressive too - completely different to its core business. Totally flies in the face of any advice to stick with the business you know.

Amazon getting into on demand hosting early is in it's DNA. If you look at them as a business that grew up on earning profits on very small margins. And that early on demand hosting was pretty low margin, that in their case also let them offset some risk of building data centers earlier than they would have otherwise.

Interesting viewpoint - also achieving profit through massive scale is their DNA as well I would say.

Still though, enterprise is a tough domain in my experience, AWS did a great job

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

#172

Post by screye »

shadowgovt wrote: post #167
screye wrote: post #151

Google is the Valve of the internet space. Like Valve they have created products that took over the whole space. They have a tendency to completely drop things when they don't pick up traction early enough. (artifact, everything Google) There used to be a Halo around both companies in the 2000s, that was slowly eroded in the 2010s. They suck at communicating. They create good products that never see the light of day…

I know I'm nit-picking, but what's wrong with Valve's handling of Portal? It is a highly-successful franchise that continues to pay dividends for them with no further investment on their part, if I understand correctly.

The fact that they made probably the best puzzle game ever made and then never made another sequel for 10 years.

This is something only Valve could do, because Steam makes so much more money. No other company would leave such a lucrative franchise for so long.

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

#173

Post by shadowgovt »

xyst wrote: post #135

I hate how we are just giving away control over the internet to Amazon/Google. How does a small cloud provider stay in business when up against these multi billion dollar companies? At any point in time, these companies can just lower the cost of their products, and suffer through a few bad quarters while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die.

Focused customer service directly meeting the needs of your existing customers, and serious attention to the products and features they need.

It's not a guaranteed formula---AWS, Google, even Azure have big moats around their offerings and significant table-stakes features implemented. But "focusing entirely on the needs of the customer" is the thing their scale makes challenging; they have customers with multiple disjoint or competing needs.

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

#174

Post by kalleboo »

dangus wrote: post #117
blinotz wrote: 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…

Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure? Is GSuite or GCP support any worse or are you just assuming those experiences are the same as what you get with a free GMail account? I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free. I…

> Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure?

The point is that that doesn't matter. Even if it's not always logical, the reputation of your company as a whole sometimes matters, even in the case of corporate accounts ("nobody got fired for buying IBM" after all). Moreso in the case of startups where you have one tech guy who might have gotten burned before.

Amazon has a stellar reputation since nearly everyone has gotten a refund from Amazon for some cheap DOA $2 cable but meanwhile Google stonewalled them on some random glitch in Gmail. Even if it's not logical, those things stick around in people's heads.

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

#175

Post by shadowgovt »

screye wrote: post #172
shadowgovt wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I'm nit-picking, but what's wrong with Valve's handling of Portal? It is a highly-successful franchise that continues to pay dividends for them with no further investment on their part, if I understand correctly.

The fact that they made probably the best puzzle game ever made and then never made another sequel for 10 years. This is something only Valve could do, because Steam makes so much more money. No other company would leave such a lucrative franchise for so long.

Not every game needs a sequel. I agree that a smaller company would have been economically forced into milking the franchise, but that doesn't imply milking the franchise is universally a good thing.

Meanwhile, perpetual testing initiative was a great solution for keeping the game active without requiring active investment from Valve's game developers.

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

#176

Post by barney54 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #164
barney54 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. Data centers are all grid connected, so what really matters is the composition of generators on the grid (or at least the composition on the generators near the datacenter).

> It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. You certainly could run on it on a dedicated combination of any mix of wind/solar/hydro power and stored (e.g., battery or regenerative fuel cell) power you wanted to. In practice, you'll probably want to connect it to the grid, but directed purchases on the grid, while they don't actually select which source really powers the DC, have all the p…

You could do that, but no is no one powering their data center that way. They are all grid connected.

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

#177

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

zantana wrote: post #154
screye wrote: post #151

Google is the Valve of the internet space. Like Valve they have created products that took over the whole space. They have a tendency to completely drop things when they don't pick up traction early enough. (artifact, everything Google) There used to be a Halo around both companies in the 2000s, that was slowly eroded in the 2010s. They suck at communicating. They create good products that never see the light of day…

I think implicit in this myopia is they don't eat their own dogfood. If they have their best people managing their core products running their own infrastructure which is clearly much more reliable than GCP, then GCP won't get better. On top of which their best people will move toward their own internal services. Contrast this with the other cloud providers who seem to be using their own clouds for their primary serv…

Dogfooding usually helps with usability. I'm not sure it has much to do with big outages; GCP is big enough that all the individual decisionmakers are pretty maximally incentivized not to break it.

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

#178

Post by lotsofpulp »

linuxftw wrote: post #160
xyst wrote: post #135

I hate how we are just giving away control over the internet to Amazon/Google. How does a small cloud provider stay in business when up against these multi billion dollar companies? At any point in time, these companies can just lower the cost of their products, and suffer through a few bad quarters while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die.

How does a small anything stay in business? > while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die. This is what killed small grocery businesses. The bigger corporations lose money on lots of popular items and make margins on other products. Walmart is especially bad, they can take lots of losses on grocery because they're making margins in other areas of the store. The ultimate question is what is allowing these bigg…

>The ultimate question is what is allowing these bigger businesses to operate more efficiently than a small business?

I would think technology allowing businesses to scale with extremely low, near zero, marginal costs would be the big reason. That's why the per employee net income figures are so high for the leading tech companies, they can do so much with so little. I predict lots of vertical monopolies in the future.

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

#179

Post by ddalex »

Jwarder wrote: post #140
ddalex wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is blatantly not true. > ‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, gen…

The word indirectly in "who can be identified, directly or indirectly" seems like it opens everything up. A session ID isn't directly PII, but it can be linked a user account and from there someone's name, address, etc.

> can be linked a user account

Which is still not PII. More importantly, 3rd party advertising cookies CANNOT be linked to a user account if you don't have code that stores them in your environment. CAN has a very limited meaning, whereas it requires all the preconditions to be true (i.e. I'm storing both 3rd party cookie ID, AND session ID, AND the tables have a correlation), it does not mean "COULD if more code was written".

> and from there someone's name, address

Only if you ask for AND store those. If you're asking for example for a real name and address for an e-commerce transaction, and you're passing them to the card processor, and not saving them anywhere, not even in logs, then you're not storing PII, and you CANNOT link tracking cookies and session ID to data.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still using Firefox containers, and uBlock Origin, and pi-hole, so I totally don't like to get tracked, even if anonymous. But the tendency on HN to label anything that could be used to track a user as PII is actually damaging, because it creates false expectations about how the law actually works and how much somebody is protected.

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

#180

Post by koningrobot »

whatitdobooboo wrote: post #112
blinotz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I agree, Google is not enterprise focused as far as I can tell. Microsoft is and that why Azure has been able to do so well so quickly. It's impressive to me that Amazon was able to shift focus to AWS without much existing presence in enterprise tech stacks.

Steve Yegge's classic platforms rant gives some insight into why Amazon was ready for the cloud: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
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