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Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

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Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#131

Post by paulddraper »

superfrank wrote: post #61
lacker wrote: post #43

I was working at Google when AWS launched in 2006. The internal message was, we don't want to build a competitor. We have the technology to compete in this area, but it is fundamentally a low-margin business, whereas reinvesting in our core business is high-margin, so we should keep our infrastructure to ourselves. I wouldn't say the Google strategy was wrong per se - their stock has about 10x'd since then. But it's…

Obviously I have zero information about how they came to that conclusion, but it sounds to me like they looked too far into the future. With basically every major tech company (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM) now having some cloud offering and so many companies switching their on-site infrastructure for the cloud, it seems like it's only a matter of time until compute time becomes a commodity. Once that happens prici…

> compute time becomes a commodity

The cloud is enormously expensive if people are buying it for "compute time".

But that's the miscalculation: thinking people buy cloud for "compute time". By and large they do not. They buy cloud for flexible provision, robust management, easier deployment, and better monitoring.

And those are differentiated qualities.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#132

Post by Spooky23 »

frostyj wrote: post #52
lacker wrote: post #43

I was working at Google when AWS launched in 2006. The internal message was, we don't want to build a competitor. We have the technology to compete in this area, but it is fundamentally a low-margin business, whereas reinvesting in our core business is high-margin, so we should keep our infrastructure to ourselves. I wouldn't say the Google strategy was wrong per se - their stock has about 10x'd since then. But it's…

I thought margin on the cloud business is pretty high...

Margins are high because it's expensive. Cloud is in a big growth curve because it operationalizes capital spend and time to market (key for startups) and they have amazing software stacks which let you dump legacy people and costs.

But once you are there and make the cloud/devops process part of your DNA, you may find that it isn't the optimal place to live from a cost perspective. I moved a workload from a big cloud provider to a private datacenter recently and reduced the costs on an annual basis by like 60%. We did need to make a big capital investment.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#133

Post by whoisjuan »

joshuamorton wrote: post #100
whoisjuan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you are talking about features. I never said that AWS UX isn't horrible. It is. But GCP is also pretty shitty. They don't deserve any praise in this area at all. They have useful features but that doesn't mean their UX is good.

It seems like you're confusing UI and UX. My experience with either UI is almost nil, so I can't comment, but an ugly UI that streamlines common patterns and has sane and unsurprising defaults has good UX. As far as I know, you can accomplish all of the things GP mentioned with either AWS or GCP. Its just that doing so is much less confusing on GCP, hence better UX.

> But an ugly UI that streamlines common patterns and has sane and unsurprising defaults has good UX.

Yes. But that's not what I'm talking about (I'm a 9 to 5 designer so to keep my job I believe I need to have a strong enough foundation to not confuse UI and UX).

A product can be ugly but still functional. For example, HackerNews is kind of ugly but it has a decent UX. GCP sometimes has decent UIs with horrible UX or horrible UX with horrible UIs.

Of course, I'm speaking about web consoles. If we are going to talk about the whole developer experience (including the CLI, documentation, APIs, etc), I think it gets more complex than that. But as a user of both GCP and AWS, I think Google DX (developer experience) it's not great. Perhaps better in certain areas when compared to AWS, but not something that would deserve any praise.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#134

Post by justicezyx »

lacker wrote: post #43

I was working at Google when AWS launched in 2006. The internal message was, we don't want to build a competitor. We have the technology to compete in this area, but it is fundamentally a low-margin business, whereas reinvesting in our core business is high-margin, so we should keep our infrastructure to ourselves. I wouldn't say the Google strategy was wrong per se - their stock has about 10x'd since then. But it's…

Whoever concluded that the margin is low is probably plain clueless about the enterprise IT, or they were looking at developer-friendly tech gigs or colo-providers, etc, not the IBM Oracle EMC Vmware NetApp etc.

When I joined Amazon in 2012, the message is clearly that AWS competes with IBM Oracle EMV Vmware NetApp. I do not have proof if the original plan was that in the early days. But given my impression on Amazon and AWS' executive team, I'd say very likely enterprise IT has always been Amazon's end game.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#135

Post by whoisjuan »

rumanator wrote: post #101
whoisjuan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you are talking about features. I never said that AWS UX isn't horrible. It is. But GCP is also pretty shitty. They don't deserve any praise in this area at all. They have useful features but that doesn't mean their UX is good.

You fail to provide any evidence or even personal anectode to support any of your assertions. You make claims, other fellow users counter your argument with objective statements, but you ignore everything and opt to double down on more baseless assertions. That is not helpful at all.

I mean. I don't know what you want me to say. I'm not trying to prove that AWS UX is better than GCP or vice-versa. Perhaps GCP has features like the ones mentioned above that improve the whole developer experience, but that's not what I'm arguing here. I'm just trying to elevate the argument to another level and explain why all of them have horrible UX and it's not even worth it to compare them since the bar is so low.

I don't know what type of evidence you want me to provide. It is as simple as logging in to any of these major cloud providers' web consoles and come up with your own conclusions.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#136

Post by hef19898 »

beambot wrote: post #25

Google Cloud is worth $225B and Waymo is worth $100B [1], so the rest of Alphabet is worth less than $500B in market cap? The math doesn't add up. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-cut-40percen...

Would be interesting to have a similar estimate for AWS. My personal pet theory is that (and was already at a stock price of 1k) that around 80% came from AWS. Since I'm by no means an expert getting real numbers would be nice!

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#137

Post by justicezyx »

So my realization after the years have been these:

* Cloud margin is very high, using IBM Orale and so on, aka the "old guards" (as said by Andy Jassy: my favorite tech executive by a big margin, got to mention this as a fan boy), as the comparison.

* Cloud is the foundation of the next generation of developer platform, being irrelevant in this market is detrimental to Google. Although that was not as obvious to Google as Browser. But the metaphor is obvious now.

* Cloud is enterprise oriented, an area that both Amazon and Google were vastly behind Microsoft at 2006. Microsoft then already had a top-tier relationship with enterprise customers. Amazon was way earlier in realizing that, but Google was at least maybe 5 years behind. Diane Green's joining symbolizes the inception of the changing perception, but I'd say Diane's execution is poor (Dianne seems very distracted to me, during their time in Google).

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#138

Post by lern_too_spel »

murat124 wrote: post #15

GCP I'd say could worth definitely tens of billions, but not hundreds.

The thing that has confused most of the commenters here is that Google Cloud contains both GCP, which is a dumpster fire, and GSuite, which is probably very profitable.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#140

Post by whoisjuan »

maktouch wrote: post #98
whoisjuan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you are talking about features. I never said that AWS UX isn't horrible. It is. But GCP is also pretty shitty. They don't deserve any praise in this area at all. They have useful features but that doesn't mean their UX is good.

Well, UX means user experience. If some little features give you a better experience to me, a user, isn't that a better UX? They both have regions. One makes it easier to see at a glance. They both have the concept of reserved IP, one doesn't need to be set first. They both install ssh keys for you. One does it per user, the other per instance. One sets up cross region VPC for you. The other one makes you suffer and…

Yeah, you're right. That's definitely a better UX. But since OP was talking about GCP UI as a potential value differentiator, I was also focusing on that. Certainly something like an easy VPC setup improves the overall experience within the platform.

But I was referring to things like their documentation, the way they organize resources inside the Web Console and the confusing paths to different functionality within their UI.

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