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What is Google doing with its open source teams?

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Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#101

Post by jeffbee »

ethbr0 wrote: post #46
mike_d wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.

Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival. Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.

That doesn’t make sense in the context of google. Their own workloads are still way larger than their public cloud. Arguably their first offering, app engine, was the perfect fit because they shoved it into the cracks in between their other borg jobs. The fit of GCE in their overall platform is much worse.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#102

Post by fidgewidge »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #91
fidgewidge wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target. Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mob…

Android is just now catching up with where Windows Mobile was years ago. Execution wasn't the problem. The problem remains that Gmail and YouTube are monopolies and Google aggressively interfered with them working on WinMo because it was Android's only real competitor (an OS licensed to phone OEMs). Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience us…

YouTube hardly mattered on mobile at the time we're talking about, iPhone 1 didn't even do 3G. Gmail isn't a monopoly and never has been. iPhone came out just a few years after Gmail did, whilst Microsoft had Outlook/Exchange in the enterprise which practically was a monopoly.

The Windows team didn't really care about slick UI until long after Apple beat them on that. And the reason they scrapped CE and tried to do UWP is because the Windows API was long ago on its last legs but they hadn't been able to upgrade it properly. Whereas Apple had managed the evolution of nextstep much better, and Android was free / a clean slate design with proper sandboxing, and better consumer apps.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#103

Post by morelisp »

spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

I mostly agree, but to be a little fair to Pichai: He didn't get a company that was really in a dominant (or at least not already rapidly declining) market position. Microsoft missing the boat on the Internet might have been inherited from Gates, but Google not missing but still absolutely fucking up social networking, immediately prior to Pichai taking the role, is all on former leadership.

Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#104

Post by jeffbee »

derefr wrote: post #82
mike_d wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.

What does a company with huge datacenters do to reclaim OpEx from committed compute capacity sitting idle at non-peak periods, other than building an IaaS with idle-load-consuming services (e.g. spot instances, cloud functions, other short-lived workloads)? Do you expect them to mine Bitcoin?

That just does not describe google. If you look at their published systems papers, particularly the borg traces and the B4 SDN, their hardware runs essentially flat out 24x7. They don’t need to backfill diurnal or annual capacity

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#105

Post by tra3 »

sylware wrote: post #96
spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

"Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer" alphabet(google) and msft are own and steered by the same network of ppl from blackrock/vanguard. No magic here.

What do you mean? Is there a board?

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#106

Post by scarface74 »

derefr wrote: post #82
mike_d wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.

What does a company with huge datacenters do to reclaim OpEx from committed compute capacity sitting idle at non-peak periods, other than building an IaaS with idle-load-consuming services (e.g. spot instances, cloud functions, other short-lived workloads)? Do you expect them to mine Bitcoin?

This is a completely false take. AWS was built from the ground up as separate infrastructure.

What do you think is going to happen at peak of Amazon needs it’s own excess capacity at the same time customers need access capacity?

Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#107

Post by osigurdson »

adra wrote: post #83
spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather…

I think Microsoft's strength was their weakness in a sense. They had so much O/S related experience and assets that no one could fathom not using Windows as the core. Imagine explaining to your MS middle manager that writing a new O/S from scratch is a good idea - especially with Balmer at the helm.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#108

Post by esskay »

adra wrote: post #83
spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather…

> Microsoft didn't miss mobile

> They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat

So...they missed mobile.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#109

Post by abledon »

mike_d wrote: post #43
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should tell AWS about that race to the bottom while they continue to produce a majority of Amazon's profit.

Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...

heres a sankey diagram of q3 FY 2022 for Amazon...https://imgur.com/a/OupE8ES. (from https://www.appeconomyinsights.com/p/amazon-day-1)

Ads + Twitch = 9.5B, AWS = 20.5B

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#110

Post by cmrdporcupine »

osigurdson wrote: post #107
adra wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather…

I think Microsoft's strength was their weakness in a sense. They had so much O/S related experience and assets that no one could fathom not using Windows as the core. Imagine explaining to your MS middle manager that writing a new O/S from scratch is a good idea - especially with Balmer at the helm.

Apple didn't write an OS from scratch either. iOS was really a fork of OS X, and followed on the experience Apple & NeXT had in porting NeXTstep around various architectures. Something that MS also had a lot of experience with, with NT.

Apple won/created this market on fit and finish, excellent marketing, singular focused execution, and supply chain genius.

With wince, Microsoft was running around farming out their OS to multiple 3rd party vendors, trying to create a commodity marketplace for their OS on other people's devices.

Apple won on vertical integration, created a focus product, and profited off the experiences and reputation they had with iPod in order to make a winner.

But people also forget that at this point in Apple's history, it was kind of... make or break. The iPod and then iPhone were huge gambles, that paid off in spades. If they had failed Apple would have continued to be a minority PC producer with poor profit margins and a reputation for being "weird" and "niche." Even after the success of the iMac in the late 90s, they were still in quite a bit of $$ risk.

The intense vertical integration and the product focus in the iPhone could also have failed. It was risky but it paid off for them. MS (and others) had a lot more to lose, and was more conservative.

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