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The IBM-ification of Google?

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Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#111

Post by raggi »

xbar wrote: post #107
raggi wrote: post #38

> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that i…

Victim-blaming is not appropriate here. Google did not "likely" screw up. To be sure, however, this is a keen lesson for every CTO.

i was responding to the article, i hadn't bothered to read railways pm as it's not super interesting, anyway, i've read it now, here: https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-may-19-2026-gcp-a... and indeed they weren't at fault

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#112

Post by jasomill »

coderenegade wrote: post #100
trollbridge wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at one point, IBM was at the head of the pack with AI. Remember Deep Blue?

IBM got to where it is today by being complacent and not keeping up with innovation. Google is notably at the forefront of innovation, in a driving seat, and that innovation directly stands to benefit one of their core businesses in a way that the market is probably only just beginning to understand. It's an entirely different situation, imo.

A technology company that's profitably doing over $50 billion in sales after more than 100 years with no obvious signs of impending doom sounds like an okay position to me, even if the tables have turned since 1984[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#113

Post by ralph84 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #66
MrDarcy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is incorrect and misleading. Railway did have an account manager and they did call them and they did pick up the phone and work with them to restore service.

An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation. I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation,…

The account manager was almost surely just as blindsided as the customer.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#114

Post by senkora »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #98
isaisabella wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not Oracle

Because Oracle = Larry Ellison = The Lawnmower > You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall…

You honestly just have to treat any Oracle product as malware, and proactively scan for it / block it from being installed on employee laptops in the first place.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#115

Post by lelanthran »

KnuthIsGod wrote: post #34

All empires eventually decay and die. Wang, Bull, Unisys, IBM, DEC, the Mongolian Empire, the Hungarian Empire, Dutch Empire, the Portugese Empire.... they all exist in some form, but are shadows of their former selves. IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks. Over time, the company became synonymous with failure and mediocrity.

> IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks.

IBM didn't die :-/

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#116

Post by breppp »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #35
coderenegade wrote: post #32

Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but th…

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Google. Seems apropos.

For choosing Google Cloud? When was it ever conventional to choose Google Cloud?

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#117

Post by cco »

esrauch wrote: post #97
Forgeties79 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation. I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation,…

I'm not sure what you think account managers do that they can prevent accidents/bugs like that?

Typically a strong account team builds processes with other teams (compliance, engineering, etc) that enshrines and insulates important accounts from accidents like this.

In this case, I'd expect major accounts (and maybe Railway isn't above this level?) to be in a protected tier that is immune from automated suspensions like this.

If suspicious traffic occurs that _would_ trigger a suspension like that, the account team would be paged. Because this may mean your important account was compromised, shipped a bug, has been hit by something and you should immediately start working _with_ them to figure it out.

Fairly basic for a company with any customer management motion at all.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#118

Post by re-thc »

The Railway accusation focuses on 1 side of the story. No real details on if Railway did anything and if the suspension was warranted.

Google may not be wrong. Who knows. Easy to blame the larger company.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#119

Post by bushbaba »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #35
coderenegade wrote: post #32

Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but th…

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Google. Seems apropos.

Not really I’d not call Google the safest/most popular choice for AI or Cloud.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#120

Post by lern_too_spel »

sergiotapia wrote: post #95
raggi wrote: post #38

> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that i…

You are completely misinformed here. Railway had dedicated reps and everything. Even the number of the head. One of their railway company leads said so on X or their Discord during the outage. They paid for everything you can pay for to get Google on the horn and ready because they are not a tiny company. Yet it was still terrible.

Spot on. This is the wrong takeaway. The account manager can't do anything to prevent the problem. They can only escalate, and that's what they did.

The right takeaway is you should not use Google Cloud because Google itself doesn't use Google Cloud for anything critical. I don't know how many times I've said this, but it clearly hasn't sunk in. A Googler once responded, "Well ackshually, Google Domains is built on Google Cloud." Google Domains isn't mission critical and has since been sold to Squarespace.

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