Neither is AWS, or Azure. Cloud platforms are their own product. Only one company needs Google's internal infrastructure. That company is called Google. The lessons learned in building those systems can be applied to more generalized solutions which can be sold as standalone products.
Microsoft is definitely running on Azure. I can't imagine AWS is doing anything different. https://www.pcmag.com/article/364611/microsofts-cloud-how-th... > Guthrie said Microsoft has long had a tradition to "eat our own dog food," which means it runs its own systems on top of the same software it offers to customers. Microsoft IT was an early customer for Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365, and has moved the vast m…
Neither is AWS, or Azure. Cloud platforms are their own product. Only one company needs Google's internal infrastructure. That company is called Google. The lessons learned in building those systems can be applied to more generalized solutions which can be sold as standalone products.
Microsoft is definitely running on Azure. I can't imagine AWS is doing anything different. https://www.pcmag.com/article/364611/microsofts-cloud-how-th... > Guthrie said Microsoft has long had a tradition to "eat our own dog food," which means it runs its own systems on top of the same software it offers to customers. Microsoft IT was an early customer for Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365, and has moved the vast m…
That just means Microsoft is using Azure. It doesn’t mean Azure is an internal Microsoft service that was “productized”.
I’m not willing to die on this hill. I could be wrong about the origins of Azure. AWS and GCP are not productized versions of internal services.
In addition to search I'd say: - Gmail - Android (and Google Play) - Drive - Maps - Chromecast - Google Home - YouTube (+Premium) are super successful.
There's no evidence that YouTube is profitable[1]. In fact, there's no evidence any of this is profitable. Android, Gmail, and Maps make money from ads, not from charging users directly. That makes them the same business as search. Hardware businesses like Home and Chromecast usually aren't profitable, and Google (like Amazon) is likely using them to keep people in their ecosystem. That leaves Drive, which might have…
Every day that Youtube exists without competitors it further solidifies itself as the only video platform like itself that will exist.
Gmail makes money from business users and I would go as so far to say that if it doesn't make more money that Drive now it will make more money in 10 years from people who have lived their entire lives inside of a gmail account using it for business.
> So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use. Google has lo…
Absolutely. I like GCP more than AWS or Azure, but I don't use it because I don't trust that individual services will be available long term. Meanwhile, AWS sends me emails about minor service changes that may affect me well over a year in advance. (MS has a reputation for long term support, but the Azure UI was just so terrible. Maybe they've changed it by now?)
Azure UI is poo-poo'd compared to ARM templates, Azure Blueprints or PowerShell scripts.
None of those are enterprise products. Consumer businesses given away for free are very different than directly selling infrastructure and services.
Hangouts was a GSuite (enterprise) service. Customers were forced to move Chat & Meet when they shut down Hangouts. https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...
True, but that’s a replacement and upgrade to a new service. Do you consider that the same as a shutdown with no alternative?
I’d say the biggest situation that materially affected companies was the Google Maps pricing change, but most seem to be fine with that now.
Why would they even care about ‘winning’ the cloud? To what end? Google is officially and advertising company, and the large majority of their revenue depends on it. This strategy is working so well for them, I just don’t see why they would even care about grinding out a little extra market share in the cloud hosting space. Why? Maybe just to boost their ego? Is it really worth it to them? Whatever comparatively smal…
One of the things that google does is basically trade compute and storage (whether its a google search or gmail storage) for advertising revenue.
In a world where the public cloud is dominated by a handful of providers its likely (if not already the case) that AWS will become by far the biggest buyer (with the best economics) of compute and storage.
Obviously there are many other barriers to competing with google, but if amazon could provision the amount of storage and compute needed for YouTube and search in the headroom of its public cloud (and even worse if AWS customers could do this for a cheaper cost than google itself) this would be a negative thing for google.
> So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use. Google has lo…
Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to billing for cloud services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.
Google not just terrible here, it’s just void in terms of customer service. We had an outage due to GCP glitch , there were no way to report even. Recently I heard about bare metal offering , tried to talk most of sales i talked wasn’t aware of GKE term. I wasn’t able to get pricing eventually after 2-3 calls . It’s probably top secret
This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…” Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.
Also AWS is just the best at marketing their services. They did what Google did with search. We always say we "Google" things. Developers these days say "Chuck it in S3" or "Run it on EC2". I feel they have a strong advantage because they've kind of come to own the language of the cloud.
I don't think I've ever heard AWS-specific terms applied to GCP or Azure infrastructure.
In addition to search I'd say: - Gmail - Android (and Google Play) - Drive - Maps - Chromecast - Google Home - YouTube (+Premium) are super successful.
There's no evidence that YouTube is profitable[1]. In fact, there's no evidence any of this is profitable. Android, Gmail, and Maps make money from ads, not from charging users directly. That makes them the same business as search. Hardware businesses like Home and Chromecast usually aren't profitable, and Google (like Amazon) is likely using them to keep people in their ecosystem. That leaves Drive, which might have…
Gmail makes money from enterprises that use Gsuite.
This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…” Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.
The issue is that folks here think GCP is the same thing as Google Reader. That's absurd. Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone. GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly. https://9to5g…
The issue for me isn't Reader itself but what it says about the disconnect between Google management and us, the users of Google products. That seems to have happened around the time Google went from _having_ a "user base" to being effectively ubiquitous. I can't speak for others, but Google of the 2000s "got" the hacker/nerd mindset in a way that was the closest thing to empathy I've ever felt from a corporation. That sounds naive to write down here in almost-2020, but that was how it felt at the time. When Reader died, so did that feeling, and now all of us are running around unsure if the Google products we personally care about are the ones Google management care about. Leaks like this one do not inspire confidence in that.