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Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

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Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#31

Post by shubhamjain »

This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day.

When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google. They already operate the world’s largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively. They can sustain large investment far longer than any other company simply because of how profitable all their existing businesses are. I just wish they would get their act together when it comes to product management.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#32

Post by throwaway-aws9 »

chii wrote: post #13
tomaytotomato wrote: post #11

There was a blog post on here the other day about moving back to bare metal hosting with practical explanations and problem solving. Cloud is great but its just borrowing someone else's machine for a fee. It's like a hyper-scalable and granular mainframe but like all mainframes, the client is powerless without it. We need to get our acts together and not allow ourselves to be smothered in silicon nimbus (clouds) and…

> Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....? I rather not, but instead these compute clouds should be treated similarly to utilities - you don't really want to be running your own generators for electricity do you? So why is it that we can setup utilities properly, where everybody can trust that it stays on and usable for a price low enough? My theory is that vendor lock in is t…

I've seen how the cloud changed over 20 years from s3/ec2 in 2006 to what we have today. I've also seen how it's built at AWS. It's ironic they call it utility computing.

What I always feared as a user was that they'd invent a new billable metric, which happened a few times. Have you ever seen a utility add them at this pace? The length of your monthly usage report shows all those items at $0 that could eventually be charged. Let that sink in.

Another interesting element is that all higher level services are built on core services such as s3/ec2. So the vendor lock in comes from all propaganda that cloud advocates have conditioned young developers with.

Notice how core utilities in many countries are state monopolies. If you want it to be a true utility, perhaps that's the solution to get them started. The state doesn't need a huge profit, but it needs sovereignty and keep foreign agents out of its DCs. Is it inefficient? Of course. But if all you really need is s3/ec2 and some networking / queuing constructs, perhaps private companies can own higher tier / lock-in services while guaranteeing it runs on such a utility. This would provide their users reduced egress fees from a true utility which doesn't need (and is not allowed to have) a 50x profit on that line item.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#33

Post by Snafuh »

lvl155 wrote: post #14
JCM9 wrote: post #4

Impressive results. Microsoft also reported strong cloud growth yesterday. Amazon reports today. AWS has been slipping and at current growth rates would slip to the number 2 cloud provider in a few years time… let’s see if that trend holds true today.

Amazon and Apple are two companies taking it conservatively in this bubble. Possibly because they actually have gone through the last bubble with some pain. Microsoft to some degree but they have the luxury of OpenAI. We are at a point in this bubble where planned capex is approaching theorectical limits of actual energy capacity. Let’s see when they start pumping coal companies because they restart those plants…not…

It's already happening. Coal use in the US was up 15% in H1/25 compared to the previous year. Partially due to a shift from higher prices gas.

Coal retirement in the US is almost entirely driven by economics. If someone needs the power, coal plants will stay open and capacity factor go up.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/elec_coal_renew.php

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#34

Post by embedding-shape »

refulgentis wrote: post #9
fidotron wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it just causes developer busy work with no additional value. Anyone remotely familiar with Google as a third party developer will notice the pattern: this will ramp up until it is almost your entire job simply dealing with their changes, most of which will be not-quite-actual-fixes to their previous round of changes. This is not unique to Google, but it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other compa…

> it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other companies, and so help preserve the moat. Worked at Google for 7 years, and your post reminds me it is time to share a secret: it is Koyaanisqatsi* and people's base instincts unbridled, no more. There is no quicker route to irrelevancy than being the person who cares about something from last years OKRs. * to be clear, s/Koyaanisqatsi/too big to exist hea…

If it's so obvious, and Google supposedly know this internally, and can obviously tell by others that some are avoiding Google because they're fast at sunsetting services, why are they not doing anything about it?

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#35

Post by UncleMeat »

lazyfanatic42 wrote: post #17
andrewstuart wrote: post #3

Such a blerg nothing company with almost no innovation sitting on a cash volcano that never stops erupting. I often think about what an incredible bargain YouTube was at $1 billion.

Simple math proves that wrong. You don't make billions doing nothing.

Google is definitely not doing nothing. A lot of smart people are there who work very hard.

But, as a Google employee for about a decade at this point, I really do think that the company is trash when it comes to planning and coordination and is getting worse at it over time. I think that there are a lot of things it never really needed to learn how to do because the ads money is just so outrageous.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#36

Post by jp_nc »

refulgentis wrote: post #9
fidotron wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it just causes developer busy work with no additional value. Anyone remotely familiar with Google as a third party developer will notice the pattern: this will ramp up until it is almost your entire job simply dealing with their changes, most of which will be not-quite-actual-fixes to their previous round of changes. This is not unique to Google, but it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other compa…

> it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other companies, and so help preserve the moat. Worked at Google for 7 years, and your post reminds me it is time to share a secret: it is Koyaanisqatsi* and people's base instincts unbridled, no more. There is no quicker route to irrelevancy than being the person who cares about something from last years OKRs. * to be clear, s/Koyaanisqatsi/too big to exist hea…

If they actually incentivized a group to support stability and continuity among enterprise customers, they would probably be able to diversify their revenue away from ads. Microsoft understands this…

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#37

Post by curt15 »

chii wrote: post #13
tomaytotomato wrote: post #11

There was a blog post on here the other day about moving back to bare metal hosting with practical explanations and problem solving. Cloud is great but its just borrowing someone else's machine for a fee. It's like a hyper-scalable and granular mainframe but like all mainframes, the client is powerless without it. We need to get our acts together and not allow ourselves to be smothered in silicon nimbus (clouds) and…

> Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....? I rather not, but instead these compute clouds should be treated similarly to utilities - you don't really want to be running your own generators for electricity do you? So why is it that we can setup utilities properly, where everybody can trust that it stays on and usable for a price low enough? My theory is that vendor lock in is t…

The most pernicious effect of Big Cloud is the general erosion of infra know-how in the general public. People increasingly need to go out of their way to learn about computer hardware, networking, databases, disaster recovery, etc, when the default business decision is to outsource those tasks to a cloud service provider. For Cloud to become a commodity, computer professionals need to understand both infra and software.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#38

Post by Thorrez »

threetonesun wrote: post #23
chii wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....? I rather not, but instead these compute clouds should be treated similarly to utilities - you don't really want to be running your own generators for electricity do you? So why is it that we can setup utilities properly, where everybody can trust that it stays on and usable for a price low enough? My theory is that vendor lock in is t…

The cloud providers themselves run their own generators. Computers aside, every place I worked at that did critical manufacturing ran their own generators as well. That said, I agree with your general statement, that this should be a commodity, but we’ve accepted that vendor lock in is better than having a department / the cost of humans lock-in.

They only run the generators if the power company fails. To bring that analogy to servers, that would be running your loads in the cloud, but in the case of an outage, failing over to bare metal servers you run yourself. That sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#39

Post by sgt »

cube00 wrote: post #24
RedShift1 wrote: post #2

We use GCP at work, it works well for what we use it (VMs, container storage, cloud file storage), I wish they would stop deprecating stuff though, it just causes developer busy work with no additional value.

> it works well for what we use it How do you handle the slow console?

Microsoft, especially the Partner site for Microsoft Store and so on, is also exceptionally slow. Regular Azure not much better.

I guess the big providers learn from each other.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#40

Post by Thorrez »

threetonesun wrote: post #23
chii wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....? I rather not, but instead these compute clouds should be treated similarly to utilities - you don't really want to be running your own generators for electricity do you? So why is it that we can setup utilities properly, where everybody can trust that it stays on and usable for a price low enough? My theory is that vendor lock in is t…

The cloud providers themselves run their own generators. Computers aside, every place I worked at that did critical manufacturing ran their own generators as well. That said, I agree with your general statement, that this should be a commodity, but we’ve accepted that vendor lock in is better than having a department / the cost of humans lock-in.

I think Google has at least 1 datacenter that uses batteries instead of generators.

>In Belgium, we’ll soon install the first ever battery-based system for replacing generators at a hyperscale data center. In the event of a power disruption, the system will help keep our users’ searches, e-mails, and videos on the move—without the pollution associated with burning diesel.

https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/cleaner-dat...

Disclosure: I work at Google, but no on anything related to this.

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