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Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

What is bad about the UX when you log in, in your opinion?

- Navigation: A sidebar that doesn't scale with their growing offering. Dozens of services stacked in a scrollable sidebar.

- Hierarchy: A lack of hierarchy concepts and the overall feeling that everything is scattered around. No clear defined boundaries between entities. For example, they have something called API Library, which for some weird reason, seems to be the default path to enable things that are required in specific service consoles.

Also, the way they compartmentalize things. Why is there a section in the sidebar that reads "Products" and then there are other sections at the same hierarchy level like "Compute"..aren't the services under Compute products as well?

-Discoverability: Very poor discoverability across all services. For example, go down the path of enabling one of their flagship services like Google Vision. The expected path would be something like entering the console > going to the sidebar > Finding Vision > Enabling API. Does it work like that? Nope. There's only a link to the documentation that explains how to enable it.

- Visibility: Ok. Staying with the Vision example. Now I want to see my usage of this API. It would make sense to see this data inside that console. Is it there? Nope. You have to go back and start hunting down where to find this information. Apparently they expect you to know that this lives under the API console, but there's no way to know this especially if you used the CLI or one of the "Enable Buttons" within the documentation. Maybe they thought those were useful, but they just break the learnability of the platform.

I could keep going...but you get the idea. This is not usable. I don't blame them either, to be honest. Even Google and Amazon have limited resources and the UX is a low priority for them since the value proposition is coming from other areas (security, reliability, offering range, price, etc)... but I feel as this space matures this is gonna become an area where the legacy of their poor decisions will generate issues down the road.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can get Google support with Google One [0] for as low as 2$ a month (along side 100GB of storage). The issue is people expect free products they haven't paid a penny for to have live customer support, which doesn't make much sense at the billion user scale. [0] https://one.google.com/

Have you ever interacted with Google support as a paying customer? It's miserable in my experience.

As an enterprise customer using Google Cloud, yes, and so far its been very good.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Perhaps there is a case once you learn AWS and GCP that they are similar in UX. But as a developer who doesn't typically deal with cloud deployments I found that setting up a GCP instance with all the security features (specifically network related) I want is significantly easier.

Maybe that isn't a good argument for a business to use GCP over AWS but it is an important point.

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

#184
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market share is measured in some very, very funny ways. Like Office 365 being part of their cloud division, including when people download and install office on their computer. If Google was to switch things around, and have Ad-words, Gmail, maps, etc, all pay a small, internal fee to google cloud to host their servers own internal servers, I think the market-share conversation would be very, very different.

Most of internal Google services don't run on Google cloud. Was true as of a couple of years ago and I haven't heard differently from my Google friends recently.

Just reclassify Borg as Google Cloud Internal Edition and boom, everything runs on Google Cloud. This sounds stupid but it's no worse than what MS and IBM have done. Heck, when you are your own customer maybe you could even double-count some revenue...

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

#185
post #180
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this argument get made so much? Why is it assumed that the market will behave this way?

Because we have 100 years of free market capitalist based economic history that it would be unwise to ignore?

Enterprise computing was already pretty mature in the pre-cloud era yet prices were (and still are) very high. So when exactly does this commoditization kick in? 50 years? 100?

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

#186
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…

I think AWS made a change in strategy between 2006 and 2012 because their early architecture and marketing were totally anti-enterprise.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is bad about the UX when you log in, in your opinion?

- Navigation: A sidebar that doesn't scale with their growing offering. Dozens of services stacked in a scrollable sidebar. - Hierarchy: A lack of hierarchy concepts and the overall feeling that everything is scattered around. No clear defined boundaries between entities. For example, they have something called API Library, which for some weird reason, seems to be the default path to enable things that are required i…

You can pin items on the drawer to the top.

The search within console is fantastic for finding things quickly.

I have yet to find a platform that doesn't have some amount of learning curve.

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

#188

Google is dumping money into their enterprise programs. They hired some experienced people to run it. Their offerings are soooo much better quality than AWS. Try getting a GPU vm with a local SSD on AWS, does not exist... In GCP I can set custom values for CPU, MEM, GPU, SSD. Try to ssh to a machine, and then one without a public network connect. Google is the only provider with a good portal to their partner program…

They're good until you get automatically banned for some reason and there is zero people you can contact to fix it.

I have people I can call, we have a business account.

We are going to be upgrading soon to a special partner account that gives us an enhanced portal / cloud console to make managing our clients' accounts much easier.

We migrate companies from AWS to GCP. If anyone is interested, please reach out. Happy to provide reference accounts.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is today, but it won't last. As automation tooling gets better the barriers to entry drop and competition kicks in and lowers prices. You can see it already: Aws are constantly lowering their prices. It's not just to be nice, they're competing hard.

> the barriers to entry drop The barriers for entry on the Cloud will never drop. The Cloud grows more and complex and regional data centers across the globe are impossible for any company without gobs of money to compete with. The margins will drop, but only because the competition between the big 3 has barely even started; even that I believe is a decade away.

> The margins will drop, but only because the competition between the big 3 has barely even started; even that I believe is a decade away.

Why? My guess is that the market for Cloud computing is constantly expanding and there isn't a plateau in sight?

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're good until you get automatically banned for some reason and there is zero people you can contact to fix it.

I have people I can call, we have a business account. We are going to be upgrading soon to a special partner account that gives us an enhanced portal / cloud console to make managing our clients' accounts much easier. We migrate companies from AWS to GCP. If anyone is interested, please reach out. Happy to provide reference accounts.

Or they could just go visit https://cloud.google.com/support/ themselves.
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