Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34% • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by Esophagus4 » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:22 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #88

Esophagus4 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the software deployed on top of them will. So you either: 1) postpone all your updates for years until a bad CVE hits and you need to update or some application goes end of life and you’re screwed because updating becomes a massive exercise 2) do regular updates and patches to the entire stack, including Linux, in which case, you’re in the same position you were before with running on the stack rot trea…

My rationale for staying up to date aggressively is that it minimizes integration work. Basically integration work multiplies, it doesn't just accumulate. So the further you fall behind the more that can break when you finally do upgrade. And you create needlessly more work related to testing and fixing all that. Upgrading a system that was fully up to date until a few days/weeks ago is generally easy. There's only s…

If you’re willing to put in the maintenance work, you’ll probably be in good shape whether you’re on plain VMs or a snazzy cloud provider managed service.

If business understands that you need time to work on these things :’)

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

#92

Post by orwin » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #69

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,…

It's not really impressive to me in absolute terms that GCP grew by 34% because it's still in last place behind Azure. I worked with all three major CSPs at a past company and Google, by far, had the worst support, the worst network, the most issues, and at the same time they were the least willing to build custom features for us while Azure and AWS would constantly fight for our business. IMHO I think Microsoft is a…

I build tools for our security teams, I guarantee you the only reason we use Microsoft Azure is corporate deals. All the critical infrastructure is on AWS (including our Azure monitoring tools), and if we could move from Azure to GCP all our security experts would be happy (except maybe the red team members whose job would be harder)

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

#93

Post by garbthetill » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:25 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #85

whynotminot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might have missed the boat on that. It’s everyone’s wet dream that Apple buys Anthropic, but I’m guessing their valuation now is already too high even for Apple. And why would Amazon let that happen? It’s a solid match but not happening unless the AI market craters and Apple swoops in to buy them for vastly less.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple eventually decides that AI isn’t even a market worth existing in beyond some basic on-device tools. They might say, have fun making single digit or negative profit margins on AI, we’ll sell subscriptions and iPhones and extended warranties.

apple is quite smart with this, there was a time when people thought they were dumb for not buying up tesla and ultimately shutting down their self driving division, but now it seems like a good bet.

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

#94

Post by panick21 » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

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…

Sounds like you should apply to Oxide Computer.

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

#95

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

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,…

Google is on pace to have >1B Gemini MAUs by Q2 2026.

This definitely doesn't look like it's going to be a winner takes all market.

OpenAI doesn't release MAUs, but it's possible Gemini could surpass OpenAI in MAUs (but really unlikely DAUs) by the end of 2026.

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

#96

Post by adzm » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

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…

> ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET

Notably all of these still work, even if not getting new updates.

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

#97

Post by mg » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

Esophagus4 wrote: post #68

mg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One approach to prevent being hit by "stack rot" is to build everything on top of plain Linux VMs. Those rarely change.

Unfortunately the software deployed on top of them will. So you either: 1) postpone all your updates for years until a bad CVE hits and you need to update or some application goes end of life and you’re screwed because updating becomes a massive exercise 2) do regular updates and patches to the entire stack, including Linux, in which case, you’re in the same position you were before with running on the stack rot trea…

RedShift1 complains that GCP is "deprecating stuff". I wouldn't put doing regular updates in the same problem category as having to deal with part of your stack disappearing.

To me "I wish they would stop deprecating stuff" sounds like any part of the stack has something like a 1% or even 10% chance in any given year to be shut off.

I would expect that by carefully choosing your stack from open source software in the Debian repos, you can bring the probability of any given part being gone with no successor to less than 0.1% per year. As an example - could you imagine Python becoming unavailable in 2026? Or SQLite? Docker?

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

#98

Post by ryandvm » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:35 PM UTC

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,…

Google has the resources to win AI, but I still don't see a way to resolve the tension between good AI and ad revenue. A useful AI tells me what I need to know, but Google's cash cow is selling users to advertisers. Those are fundamentally oppositional and I don't see a clear way to resolve it.

Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!"

Once Google has to start making money from AI, talking to Gemini is going to feel like talking to that friend that invited you to dinner only to try to pitch you on an MLM.

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

#99

Post by seneca » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #69

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,…

It's not really impressive to me in absolute terms that GCP grew by 34% because it's still in last place behind Azure. I worked with all three major CSPs at a past company and Google, by far, had the worst support, the worst network, the most issues, and at the same time they were the least willing to build custom features for us while Azure and AWS would constantly fight for our business. IMHO I think Microsoft is a…

I have used the major hyperscalers for years. I agree with you that Google is the worst business partner, but saying they have the worst network and more issues does not align with my experience at all. Azure is miles behind on technical prowess.

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

#100

Post by garbthetill » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:41 PM UTC

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,…

idk google is so flaky, one must not forget that they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around. Google often could dominate a market, yet they kill the product/tech instead of keeping a small team to maintain it.

I think the winner will be between xai or meta, im leaning more with xai since elon seems to always have 100% conviction even with seemingly bad ideas and he is way more technical than sam & zuck