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How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

businessinsider.com

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Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#61

Post by kuschku »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #8
pm90 wrote: post #6

> When pointing out that Microsoft also offers a computer vision API, translation services, and APIs for Office 365, and that IBM also offers weather data and language services, and so on, Greene's got a comeback ready. "We have Chromebooks." Is she joking? I can't see how they make Google's cloud more attractive than others. Am I missing something here? Edit: I also wanted to add that there wasn't much concrete info…

Like she said - Chromebooks are very secure and easy to administer. They're also the ideal choice for running Google Apps in the enterprise.

"Secure" if your attack vector doesn’t include nation states.

Off-premises cloud products in general are useless for any company in aviation, nuclear engineer, military, etc. Unless they’re in the US, then usually they can afford to do it, as the cloud services are in the same country.

Looking back at the snowden leaks, containing proof of the NSA serving NSLs to cloud providers and hacking Airbus servers to provide internal data and blueprints to Boeing, so Boeing would win a contract, shows that trusting US cloud providers is just as risky as trusting chinese ones.

But for your grandparents that have nothing worthy of espionage, a Chromebook is likely good enough.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#62

Post by kuschku »

boulos wrote: post #36
bitmapbrother wrote: post #7

GCP will be adding 2 new regions by the end of 2016 and bringing an additional 10 regions online by the end of 2017. How does this compare to the scale of AWS?

AWS currently has: - three in the US (1 in Virginia, one in Oregon, one in Northern California) - two in Europe (Dublin and Frankfurt) - four in Asia (Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul) - one in South America (São Paolo) and both Montreal and India announced. So by part way through 2017, the "numbers" would be sort of comparable but the real factors are your latency requirements, data sovereignty (hello Germany!) and t…

> data sovereignty

The German laws on that are interesting, and I don’t think Google’s Cloud can every comply with them – because you may not give any foreign third party access to personally identifiable data, or move it to a country with lower data privacy laws, hosting it in a Google-provided system would be quite problematic.

Although the laws are a pain (including for me, even if you just host an IRC bouncer for a bunch of people they become quite interesting), I wouldn’t trade them away for anything, because they help ensure that all spying that happens can be democratically regulated by those who are spied upon.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#63

Post by querulous »

wstrange wrote: post #60
querulous wrote: post #37

google cloud seems like a repackaging of internal google services which is fine but most companies don't want to migrate existing code to google's homegrown tech. the story for running postgres, oracle, mssql, spark, hadoop, kafka, etc on google cloud is vastly inferior to the same on aws where they either offer it as a managed service or someone else has done and documented the work required to do it

Google offers managed service variants comparable to most of those AWS services. For example - Cloud SQL. How are these anymore "home grown" than the AWS equivalents?

calling cloud sql comparable to aws rds is exactly what i mean

cloud sql offers a single version of mysql

aws rds has multiple versions of postgres, mysql, oracle, mssql and aurora

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#64

Post by obulpathi »

fpgaminer wrote: post #45
mimming wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear things are more difficult. I'd love to hear specifics, if you're interested in sharing. I'd love to try to get them fixed :) And yeah, I'm a developer advocate on GCP

It's a thousand paper cuts scenario; nothing big and specific, just running into little problems constantly. Honestly, that's worse than running into big problems. It makes us go from trying to accomplish what should be a simple change, to spending three hours hammering an API with random combinations of inputs to find the magical incantation that makes it work correctly. Some examples: Cloud Storage doesn't support…

HN comment space was not sufficient enough for me to write about the ways AWS drives me insane. So, here is my blog on 1000 cuts by AWS: https://medium.com/google-cloud/the-future-of-cloud-computin.... I feel Google cloud is much better engineered, focusing on developer happiness and productivity.

Talking specifically about my field, Cloud, Big Data and DataScience, its so painful to build a decent data stack that can handle few terabytes of data, let alone petabytes of data. Google Cloud (Pub/Sub, Dataflow & Big Query) make it a breeze to handle petabytes of data. You can literally debug a petabyte scale pipeline, while its running. Unified logs, metrics, monitoring, alerting is another feature that shows how well the Google Cloud platform is built with developer in mind.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#65

Post by krakensden »

> Google's competitive strength, Greene believes, is the breadth of the tech it can offer an enterprise.

> Enterprise-app developers can tap into things like Maps, Google's computer-vision engine (the tech that powers Google Photos), weather data, and language/translation/speech recognition. They can build apps on top of Google's Calendar, documents, spreadsheet and presentation apps.

> And, under Greene's new integrated organization, they can even tap into the tech that powers Google's ads or YouTube, search, or its many other services.

Probably a good time to reshare the famous Yegge rant about platforms: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#66

Post by eitally »

shostack wrote: post #38
SystemOut wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're saying you think that Google doesn't use Docs, Sheets, etc inside of Google but that is the entire opposite of what is happening. Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google. There really isn't any other option available. Disclosure: I work at Google

If you are a heavy Excel user, Sheets just doesn't compare in many ways. Even for basic things such as pivot tables. The interface is just painful, and you flat out can't do certain things. I really with that team would bring it up to feature parity similar to how Marissa Mayer grabbed everything she could from AdWords in terms of features and UI design.

And Sheets isn't aimed at Excel power users. It's just that Excel is seen as a niche tool in the same way Photoshop or a programming IDE would be. I think that's fairly reasonable.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#67

Post by eitally »

ryanobjc wrote: post #23
williadc wrote: post #5

tl;dr - Greene convinced Google to get serious about providing cloud services to enterprise.

I know internet comments are pointless, but this isn't the truth. Google knew it had to take things seriously, and as a result hired her. New hires, even at the exec level, usually don't have the social capital to make huge changes. So they usually tie in to an existing sentiment.

I think you'll see huge changes as a result ... and you also need to remember Diane was a Google board member for three years prior to taking this role.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#68

Post by zaroth »

phonon wrote: post #48
zaroth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but... At her tax bracket and future earning potential, the money is very likely to be worth more as a donation than as income. Total tax rate would be above 50%, but as a donation you get a $1-for-$1 deduction against future income. So the choice is something like 'keep 40 cents on the dollar today, or negate 60 cents on the dollar in taxes tomorrow.' Also, the money isn't really all gone to a 3rd party, it's i…

That doesn't make any sense. The deduction is in the same amount of the income she just received (I assume her basis (since she was a founder) was very low or near zero). It will not be available for "future income". The foundation-type entity is correct though, she will still be overseeing how it's spent.

No, that's just it! You donate the appreciated security directly without exercising/selling them first, so there is no recognized income on the personal tax return. Plus you still get to take the deduction on the fair market value of the security.

See: http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-esta...

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#70

Post by partiallypro »

wtbob wrote: post #55
partiallypro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Apps in the enterprise Google Apps for business are so bad though, I genuinely don't know why a company would pick it over 365. I could maybe see an SMB, but 365 is so robust in its offerings and just so much better all around. My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like I've been thrown back into the stone age. (Went from a large corporation to a start-up.) I feel like an SMB…

> My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like I've been thrown back into the stone age. Oddly enough, we had exactly the opposite experience when a previous employer went from 365 to Google. The Google apps just worked, while the Office 365 apps ranged from hilariously bad (Yammer & Lync) to not completely terrible (the web version of Word) to mostly decent (the web version of Excel).…

Yammer is useless, but I found Lync to be very reliable. Why use Hangouts if your company is using Slack for team channels, and it has group video chat? Of course Lync is now "Skype for Business" and I don't think its as good as Lync was tbh. I think Microsoft should buy Slack and toss it into its Office 365 offering, if you want my honest opinion.

The web version of Word and Excel are vastly superior to Google's docs and sheets, I don't know how you can argue otherwise. Though, I don't know why you'd use them when you get the full versions for free in your 365 (which totally demolish Google's offerings.) Docs hasn't really done anything since it first launched, while sheets does have decent integrations...but it's no Excel.

Now 365 has baked in project management, Delve, business insights etc. There is no comparison.

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