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The IBM-ification of Google?

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Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#131

Post by aurareturn »

sreekanth850 wrote: post #125
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.

What is the use of Account manager if a billion dollar company got screwedup for straight 5 + hours?

Without an account manager, you submit a ticket and no one looks at it for a few days.

With an account manager, you call this person up immediately, and they hound the devs in person or call up the devs personally.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#132

Post by alexgieg »

trollbridge wrote: post #90
ismepornnahi wrote: post #36

Why's this poorly written piece on top of HN?

I rather enjoyed it. I also enjoyed reading something that did not give me the immediate impression it was AI generated.

I noticed it as LLM-written by the middle of the second paragraph. The text is filled with classic rhetorical structures LLMs love making, especially the "it isn't X, it's Y" and "not A, not B, not C, but D" patterns.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#133

Post by mistic92 »

sylens wrote: post #62
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…

Our team at work uses all three major public clouds and our Google Account Team is by far the worst of the three. Nothing like having to explain the same problem I’m having from the start again on every monthly cadence call because they don’t note anything or try to help resolve it

I had the same experience with AWS. They even assigned principal someone to our case and guy sent us old blogposts and did nothing. I took a month to find "hidden" checkbox. On GCP I always escalate to pass indian support as they are super incompetent.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#136

Post by bonesss »

csallen wrote: post #84
janalsncm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.

Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money. I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.

The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial.

It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations).

Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue.

Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#137

Post by DanielHB »

lokar wrote: post #101
manquer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft. It more than compensated for Azure not being the best product . They are incredibly more responsive, you have multiple points of contacts and escalation chain of actual humans you can meet they will even come to your customer call or connect with their rep already working with the mutual customer and so on. AWS has the best tech and but not as good as Microsoft service wise, they certainly improved a lot l…

My company also used all 3 (at a very large scale / spends). MS was nice, but useless / incompetent technically. Anything non-trivial took forever to get a straight answer or resolve. We rarely got to speak directly to anyone with real expertise. AWS, we could speak directly to Sr engineers on the relevant team. Full transparency, highly responsive. They were clearly trying to understand our issues and suggest change…

My experience with AWS hasn't been good when we had major problems in redshift becoming unresponsive. Since it was an intermitent issue and not a full blown blackout they just shrugged and we kept having problems for months.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#138

Post by tardedmeme »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #53
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.

I honestly think we're in a post-disruption era in that Google/Meta/Twitter/Reddit/etc. can't die. They have too much power and they've captured the entire population now. The internet isn't made up largely of enthusiasts anymore. Mediocrity is the strength of these platforms. The eternal September has made their home and they're not moving again.

People thought that about all the other megacompanies that died too. This current crop is not special. Google has just announced they'll kill search and replace it with AI - think it'll still be strong after that?

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#139

Post by tardedmeme »

pelasaco wrote: post #122
cyberax wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products. If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.

Isn't Gmail a product? i think its pretty solid. Actually the best e-mail service out there, no?

Gmail ruined email because it used to be decentralised, but now everyone needs to be on Gmail so Gmail won't randomly discard their messages.
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