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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

#111

Post by ddalex »

kuschku wrote: post #59
ddalex wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking and advertising cookies are hardly personal information as defined by GDPR, which has a very specific and well defined meaning - name, phone numbers, addresses, government-issued IDs.

GDPR explicitly considers ANY information which identifies you — even pseudonymously generated identifiers, or IPs, or similar stuff — as PII.

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, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.

If the tracking id cannot be correlated to a name, identification number, precise location data (not country level), then it's not PII as far as the law is concerned. The criteria is clear: "relating to an identified or identifiable natural person". There is no way that simply a session ID stored in a cookie can be traced to an identity IRL.

I fell that I know what I'm talking about as I designed and implemented an customer authentication system for a medium-sized company that is based in EU, needs to respect GDPR, and I worked closely with their lawyers and operations to make sure we are fully GDPR compliant, and we passed the relevant audits.

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

#112

Post by whatitdobooboo »

blinotz wrote: post #100
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…

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.

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

#113

Post by koheripbal »

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…

I believe the "reputation" is simply the fact that you cannot call someone at Google for support unless you're an enterprise customer (GSUITE).

That's the new trend though for almost all companies. Customer telephone support is costly, difficult to manage, difficult to staff, and problematic customers consume an overwhelming amount of resources - orders of magnitude more than their value as a customer.

...on the enterprise side, I've had great experiences with their GSUITE support teams.

The online support forums are garbage though - I'll give you that.

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

#114

Post by treden »

the_gipsy wrote: post #68
iandanforth wrote: post #15

Aside: This was the first time I've tried to read a techcrunch article in Austria (or the EU in general). The splash screen implies I must consent to tracking cookies or I can't view their content. Is that not illegal?

Also, they immediately set a cookie "GCUS" with some hash-id as value, before redirecting to the consent domain. So even if you don't accept they already set a cookie!

Cookie AutoDelete.

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

#115

Post by koheripbal »

redwood wrote: post #93
mohamedattahri wrote: post #90

Article is missing the point. Growth is not the hardest problem in a fast-growing market. The real question is whether they're growing faster than their competitors, and that's unlikely.

Do you mean in terms of revenue dollars growth, revenue percent growth? Total number of customers growth? Growth amongst solo devs? Growth amongst fortune 500? There are many ways to look at this

% growth of revenues among the top cloud providers is the normal comparison.

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

#116

Post by mhb »

barney54 wrote: post #102
wwn_se wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is 100% renewable and is in my opinion the leader among the giants (AWS, Azure, Google, Ali) but there might be smaller companies that is even better. https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/...

Google is not really 100% renewable in any meaningful sense. Google (and others) buy renewable energy, but that doesn't mean their purchases match up to what their data centers actually consume for the simple reason that data centers have a pretty consistent load and wind and solar do not produce electricity consistently. For truly progressive companies in this area, they need to consider matching the hourly generati…

This seems like an overly negative assessment. If Google can pay someone else to use solar during the day instead of coal surely we can give them credit for being 100% renewal. After all the opportunities to do this temporal shifting of renewables are exhausted, maybe then it's fair to level this criticism.

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

#117

Post by dangus »

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.

In other words, I think you’re repeating really common criticisms of Google in general, but I can’t tell if you’re speaking objectively or from a matter of pure opinion.

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

#118

Post by ceejayoz »

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…

$50 gets you a support contract, and you can cancel it when you’re done.

That small business can also look at https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ and know that a 15 year old boring and low utilization service still bums along.

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

#119

Post by comicjk »

mirekrusin wrote: post #108
brazzy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooling is a pretty big factor in the energy usage of datacenters, and there's a lot of room for creative use of technology there - or simply geographic advantages.

You can use steam from cooling to produce electricity just like nuclear plants do, right? :)

No, because computer chips don't operate at 100°C (let alone 300°C like a nuclear reactor). Low-temperature heat flows contain little usable work. Typically the best option is to dump the spare heat into the nearest body of water, or into the air.

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

#120

Post by nkozyra »

ceejayoz wrote: post #118
dangus wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$50 gets you a support contract, and you can cancel it when you’re done. That small business can also look at https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ and know that a 15 year old boring and low utilization service still bums along.

Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service. Most of the GCP services that were there before and gone today have just been renamed or consolidated.

One could argue also that AWS has too many often esoteric services, and if they focused on making some of them more feature-full the service would improve (disclosure we use both and I think both are perfectly good cloud services).

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