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Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

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351–360 of 856 posts

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#351

Wow, this is a real indictment of goog’s plan to take the loot from ads and spend to diversify. They basically invented the cloud model, and if they don’t have the culture and the ability to expand to this most naturally of expansion areas.. they are doomed. There is something seriously broken at google. This puts Larry quitting in more context. He’s lost confidence in google doing this, then there is nothing left fo…

Also, I feel like they are in an almost impossible competitive position. Their main competitive tool against aws is further differentiation by ‘moving up the stack” with more and more “do the tough stuff for you” platform services that fewer and fewer people use. It’s getting so baroque with no developer “pull”, people aren’t begging for these services to solve a real problem, more like goog saying “here’s another piece that could be helpful”

Meanwhile, aws’s long history of walking people up the ramp of IAAS makes it more of a fit when they do start adding PAAS service and they fill a real need and get great adoption(for some/a lot of them)

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#352
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is way out of date, Microsoft started reporting O365 revenue separately from Azure revenue years ago.

Thanks for the heads up, I added an EDIT. Have they stopped the bundling of Azure in renewals also?

Not that I know of. "We'll give you SQL Server for free if you buy $300k of Azure" is still par for the course.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#353
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to match what it would be sold for wholesale though, just need to match the marginal cost. A graphics card that can run a AAA game is less than $500, so I don't think they are losing much on $9.99 a month. That's over $100 a year, and if each users plays 3 hours a day you can have 8 users using the same hardware at different times. Now I don't think they are using consumer hardware, and there are othe…

That's assuming people play games in well-defined shifts. I find it more likely to have 8 users play between 8pm and 11pm and zero users for the rest of the day.

Sure, but if they can spot-price other loads on them the rest of the time, I could see it working out.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Cloud" is just managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS. There are literally thousands of such providers in the world, and until everything about providing managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS becomes impossible to compete on, there always will be. The only "duopoly" will be in terms of the hyper-scale size of such providers, but very, very, very few customers actually need such hyper-scale. Not to mention, you literally get to p…

That's not the modern cloud at all. There are literally hundreds of services offered by AWS and Azure outside of what you are thinking of "rented servers". These things cannot be replaced by "managed hosting". Not that they would be slower and less reliable, these services don't even exist outside the cloud providers.

My job is managing infrastructure, services and products for large corporations in the cloud. It is managed hosting, and SaaS/PaaS, and yes, there are plenty of providers who have alternatives that we regularly use, in addition to being able to build our own with mostly open source tools. It's part of my job to find alternatives so we don't get into a jam when the one solution we use becomes unusable.

The most "cutting edge" things I remember announced at re:Invent 2019 were machine learning and AI stuff, but it was all stuff integrating with existing 3rd-party services and products. They know you want to be able to work with somebody else's tool, and they want to make it easier for you to spend money using that tool on their systems. The bulk of AWS's income is still EC2 (and data transfer); the rest is window dressing to keep you from looking elsewhere.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#355
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From two sources. 1) The article. > The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. 2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.

If it's profitable why do they care if it passes Amazon or Microsoft?

Margin and expected future profits, I assume.

Breaking even doesn’t cut it since capital could be put toward something better. Unless it has some other strategic value (eg, bragging rights, growth potential, security, etc)

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#356
post #9

If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I'm afraid something will go wrong and I won't be able to talk to a human. I've heard so many stories about the "stone wall" that is Google customer support. Also, I'm afraid the rug will get pulled out from under me if I decide to go all in given their history of axing project…

[deleted]

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#357
post #144

AWS is unassailable as number one, but Azure is more fragile than they might appear in their #2 position. They use their Office online revenue to boost their numbers (EDIT: apparently they don't do that anymore) , and their utilization is probably lower than the competition because they rely heavily on bundling new cloud services into legacy contracts at renewal to reach their targets. So lots of Office / Outlook / A…

I'd disagree. Microsoft has an EA with every significant corporate entity, and basically taxes everyone. They have the ability to leverage those relationships unlike any other. Azure is the one to beat, IMO.

Leveraged relationships Oracle has, and look how that turned out for them. Universally hated have they became.

Microsoft after a decade of Ballmer is not far from where Oracle is now, despite some recent positive reputation gains. They are already squeezing those relationship by bundling services, and it will be too far too quickly.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stadia pro tier fee is just $9.99/mo. The GPU and CPU you could consume playing a AAA game on that (yes, even on the purported "medium" settings) for just a few hours a day surely far exceeds what it could be sold for wholesale.

Don't forget that they value new ways of spying on users at a non-zero dollar amount, and probably intended to slap ads all over the interface (maybe— maybe —not the games themselves) to make up the difference, or at least were holding that possibility in reserve in case it was needed or they just wanted to kick returns up a notch later (I'd be shocked if it didn't come up in any "decks" used to sell the project inte…

Fair, and that was certainly the YouTube model— years of free video hosting to saturate the market, now preroll and interstitials everywhere with "YouTube Premium" just a click away.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#359

I want to put on end to the "you can't contact Google" comments that comes up every time Google Cloud makes the front page. You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS. We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have…

In one corner, I have the good experience of you, a semi-anonymous internet commentor.

In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN.

I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#360
post #57

As a Google Cloud Platform customer, this is pretty concerning news and seems likely to drive me to start looking at alternatives and also likely to avoid placing any dependencies on Google-specific platform features. So, if any Google Cloud employees are reading this, please report back that this just killed any interest I had in Anthos, Google Cloud Run, the managed Google "Kubernetes Apps", etc. Pretty much anythi…

All platforms not under your control should be viewed as a risk. > Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes. I think this is perfectly healthy and a stance you should take everywhere.

> I think this is perfectly healthy and a stance you should take everywhere.

There is tons of value for non-VPS: serverless functions, messaging queues, object storage, managed databases, CDNs, monitoring infrastructure, load balancers, etc.

Unless of course they aren't going to disappear or gouge you in a couple years. But AWS is very unlikely to do that.

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