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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

#181

Post by MockObject »

linuxftw wrote: post #160
xyst wrote: post #135

I hate how we are just giving away control over the internet to Amazon/Google. How does a small cloud provider stay in business when up against these multi billion dollar companies? At any point in time, these companies can just lower the cost of their products, and suffer through a few bad quarters while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die.

How does a small anything stay in business? > while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die. This is what killed small grocery businesses. The bigger corporations lose money on lots of popular items and make margins on other products. Walmart is especially bad, they can take lots of losses on grocery because they're making margins in other areas of the store. The ultimate question is what is allowing these bigg…

> Democracy in action. This is what everyone keeps voting for.

What's amazing is that, literally nobody goes to the polls hoping to vote for such outcomes, yet despite that fact, it is indeed what we end up getting. Democracy is simply unable to fix this.

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

#182

Post by jbob2000 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #175
screye wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they made probably the best puzzle game ever made and then never made another sequel for 10 years. This is something only Valve could do, because Steam makes so much more money. No other company would leave such a lucrative franchise for so long.

Not every game needs a sequel. I agree that a smaller company would have been economically forced into milking the franchise, but that doesn't imply milking the franchise is universally a good thing. Meanwhile, perpetual testing initiative was a great solution for keeping the game active without requiring active investment from Valve's game developers.

I agree with you in principle, but in this case, Valve hurt themselves by not releasing more games. If they released more sequels to Portal and Half Life, would Epic have released a Steam competitor? Right now, Steam has dwindled to a craigslist-like marketplace of garbage. So just like Nintendo has to release AAA games to keep the Nintendo Switch alive, Valve also has to release AAA games to keep Steam alive.

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

#183

Post by ethbro »

shadowgovt wrote: post #170
tjr225 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently in a support role at a company(not GCP) with some pretty big enterprise customers and let me just say that supporting software is fucking hard. You essentially have to be a systems engineer/sysadmin for every one of your customers with only as much context as your customer is willing to share. I like my job, but please have mercy on support.

You are 100% right, but it's worth noting that this is why there's a whole model of b2b interaction that involves embedded engineers partnering with a company to solve their specific problems (IBM, SAP, etc.). The reason Google support has a hard time of it is Google doesn't offer that model to all its customers, just the ones that can pay a lot of money. But support still has the job of helping everyone else (with a…

I think most of the annoyance with Google is their culturally not seeming to understand that model even exists.

Their zeitgeist appears to be "Other companies needed to provide that because their technology was wrong / incomplete. We'll just build things right instead."

Which is batshit insane, in the same way that expecting a veterinary pharmacist could prescribe for humans... with better technology.

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

#184

Post by _ea1k »

milesward wrote: post #157
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #155

Conflating consumer software and cloud infrastructure is a big lie. Microsoft is famous for having started this years ago. Why do they do it? Because AWS is at a $40B run rate, and both Google and Microsoft have to show analysts and customers that they are catching up, and that they are big enough, etc. Real "cloud infrastructure" revenues for Google are probably less than half that. The worst part is that famed and…

This number does not include that conflation...

The article says that it does, as it includes enterprise gmail/drive/chat revenue with the infrastructure revenue.

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

#185

Post by ethbro »

jrsdav wrote: post #153
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…

We're a new GCP customer with a growing amount of spend as we investigate multi-cloud (coming from AWS multi-account, words can't effectively express how much of a joy GCP is to work with). It may be because we're an attractive customer with a very large amount of AWS spend, but the folks at GCP have made our adoption pretty amazing. We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product man…

> We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product managers of GCP services

As have we. But that should ring a few alarm bells in regards to scalability and whether that can continue.

Google should just cut IBM's support org (the older, experienced folks) off the carcass, retrain them, and use them as a cadre for building their own org.

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

#186

Post by ethbro »

koheripbal wrote: post #113
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 ente…

The problem is companies that treat support as a cost center.

A healthy company mines the hell out of it for feature discovery and product improvement.

These people are literally continually talking to your customers about what their actual pain points are!

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

#187

Post by ethbro »

Legogris wrote: post #101
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…

Combine that with pushing out things before they should actually be considered ready for production and you have a constantly moving target of jumping on broken things and having them sunset just when they were starting to be stable, forcing you to either jump on the next half-ready replacement.

That's because new products get promotions.

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

#188

Post by linuxftw »

MockObject wrote: post #181
linuxftw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a small anything stay in business? > while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die. This is what killed small grocery businesses. The bigger corporations lose money on lots of popular items and make margins on other products. Walmart is especially bad, they can take lots of losses on grocery because they're making margins in other areas of the store. The ultimate question is what is allowing these bigg…

> Democracy in action. This is what everyone keeps voting for. What's amazing is that, literally nobody goes to the polls hoping to vote for such outcomes, yet despite that fact, it is indeed what we end up getting. Democracy is simply unable to fix this.

Democracy is the root cause, let alone able to fix it. And when people finally have a referendum to cast off their overlords, the overlords decide that democracy doesn't matter and jail your leaders.

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

#189

Post by dragonwriter »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #41
georgewfraser wrote: post #3

I would really love to know what the quarterly revenue is for just compute and storage, for each of the major cloud providers. Including things like G Suite and Office 365 just muddies the waters.

More specifically, they should just break these huge corporations up. Better for everyone long term, except maybe their tax dodging share holders. Google has conflicts of interest competing against their own cloud customers, some of whom are also ad customers, with products that get preferential treatment on the same platforms. Same for MS. Same for Amazon. Same for Apple. They each have overlapping businesses that a…

> It's not normal for corporations to dwarf most of the nations in the UN in terms of GDP.

It has been, actually, normal for there to be corporations with revenue dwarfing the GDP of most nations on Earth (the UN is a recent distraction) for nearly as long as joint stock corporations have been a thing.

Largely because GDP isn't exactly equally distributed among countries; the median GDP of a country on Earth right now is only in the neighborhood of $15 billion, which is in the neighborhood of the GDP of a quite small city in the developed world.

> That's not a free market anymore

“Free market” is a non-existent abstract ideal, not a thing that actually exists or can exist.

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

#190

Post by rckoepke »

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've had really high quality support from GCP and a nice human touch when I accidentally ran up a $10,000 TPU bill on my own personal project. I emailed them, saying I don't actually have that kind of money, and they not only wiped the whole bill, they refunded all the money which had been charged to my debit card and already removed from my bank account.

Very communicative, real people responding...couldn't have asked for more. Also I personally feel the UI on GCP is far more human-centered/focused than either AWS or Azure.

To me, GCP is the most "human" cloud service offering so far. I get the criticism when it's applied to GMail or Google Maps but I really don't understand that as applied to GCP.

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