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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%

#41

Post by a4isms »

fidotron wrote: post #5
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 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…

Old-timers who date back to when Joel Spolsky's early musings on the business of software development were fixtures on the HN front page will remember him using the phrase "fire and motion" for Microsoft's old strategy of constantly making changes so that everyone trying to keep up was—like the Red Queen—running as fast as they could but not getting anywhere.

> Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.

—Joel Spolsky, "Fire and Motion," 2002

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

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

#42

Post by kelvinjps10 »

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 feel like current VPSs feel like a commodity, most work the same, and even have the same ui

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

#43

Post by e12e »

> Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year.

So, "search revenue" means ads, right? So with youtube ads, 66B out of 100B revenue is from advertising?

In other words Alphabet is still an advertising company first, and foremost?

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

#45

Post by rzerowan »

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…

I believe this will only be possible once the provisioning in colo is as easy as or as fast as cloud provisioning.Think Hertzner but faster/more customizable , and for that the physical commodification would need to be more nimble/modular than it is now. Hyperscalars can drive down their costs by heavy customization of hardware/software while most colo and other builders are basically doing OEM machines or commercial rack units. The day one can be able to rent a space, spec out the machine, its network bandwith in lessthan a day and scale it in similar timeline - the power balance will shift a bit back from the hyperscalarers.

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

#46

Post by websiteapi »

e12e wrote: post #43

> Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year. So, "search revenue" means ads, right? So with youtube ads, 66B out of 100B revenue is from advertising? In other words Alphabet is still an advertising company first, and foremost?

the percentage of revenue due to ads is definitely lower than say last decade. by 2050 I expect the super majority of revenue to be non-ads.

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

#47

Post by hypeatei »

shubhamjain wrote: post #31

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,…

I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones.

NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves via multi-billion dollar "investments"

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

#49

Post by CheeseFromLidl »

a4isms wrote: post #41
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…

Old-timers who date back to when Joel Spolsky's early musings on the business of software development were fixtures on the HN front page will remember him using the phrase "fire and motion" for Microsoft's old strategy of constantly making changes so that everyone trying to keep up was—like the Red Queen—running as fast as they could but not getting anywhere. > Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they ju…

There’s a solution to the Fermi paradox somewhere in this string of comments.

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

#50

Post by TeMPOraL »

morkalork wrote: post #6
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's not just busy work, it's like being chained to a sandpaper treadmill especially in some specific "hot" domains like AI. It feels like you can build something with it and 3 months later you've got to update your code because half the dependencies are deprecated.

In AI, whatever you wrote is going to be deprecated in theee months, and in six months SOTA LLMs will one-shot it directly. That's what it means for a domain to be "hot". AI is currently the largest and most intense global R&D project in the history of humanity. So for this one field, your complaint makes no sense.
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