Live data from Hacker News

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

theinformation.com

751–760 of 856 posts

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

#751
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…

While AWS has a strong #1 offering in low-hanging fruit products like vms, dbs. I find they have terrible MVP-like execution on niche offerings (and support sucks too) for things like Fargate, K8s, one-off job execution. Azure has a stronger, more thoughtful offering in niche solutions.

I'd beg to differ. Between Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, S3, SNS, SQS, API Gateway and now EventBridge, which cost basically nothing at MVP scale and all of which's usage is drastically simplified by tools like the Serverless framework or Amplify, AWS is my go-to for anything MVP

I tried Azure. I ran away. I liked GCP, but it seems I'll steer clear for the time being.

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

#752
post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. The markets are entirely different, and ascribing the fate of Google Reader as a sign of anything on the B2B front doesn't make sense.

That's irrelevant. Its about trust, commitment and sticking it out. Google's penchant of throwing shit against a wall to see what sticks seems to prevent them from applying themselves to increase the stickiness of their shit.

You simply cannot trust Google to do right by me, the user. That's it.

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

#753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand the, in comparison tiny, cost that Google Reader and other was in the budget, would have given Google so much good will. It was in other words cheap positive PR.

Killing Reader was massive strategic blunder, which in fairness to Google was probably not obvious to see at the time. But then to repeat that with Maps API,Google+, Sketchup and Wave (perhaps wave was first) just cemented Google's untrustworthy reputation.

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

#754
I think the main reason they lag behind is because the service is perceived as worse. Amazon and Microsoft have well-established customer-development practices and they learn and resolve customers' issues. Having a good accessible support function is a great start to start listening to your clients but somehow in google culture they only want to look at aggregate statistics of a large userbase to learn something that customers are already trying to tell them through non-existing support channels.

For example, I've heard engineers complain about bad instances and intermittent networking issues. Concerns that I have never heard about in AWS except in the very early days of it.

I haven't looked at GCP in a long time, but I remember everything being very python-centric and very lightly documented.

Winning in technology often comes down to having a serious customer-centric product management function.

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

#755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Investments in data centers and infrastructure can mean that the Google Cloud may live on, but different offerings in the cloud might change with little notice.

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

#757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THING on the the scale in which they did it your statement doesn't hold any water. Go back in time and walk onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle and tell anyone that will listen in say 1995, 1999, 2001, 2007, or 2012 that Windows licensing is a dead end and see if…

I am not sure why you are saying Microsoft transformed, its still the same old one now trying to embrace Linux as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance. Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story…

Well, .NET Core and their approach to Open Source is what makes "new MS" decent (from my pov)

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

#758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand the, in comparison tiny, cost that Google Reader and other was in the budget, would have given Google so much good will. It was in other words cheap positive PR.

Killing Reader was massive strategic blunder, which in fairness to Google was probably not obvious to see at the time. But then to repeat that with Maps API,Google+, Sketchup and Wave (perhaps wave was first) just cemented Google's untrustworthy reputation.

Sketchup?? Huh. Glad I didn't get into it, then. This is the first time I've heard that, and I thought I was up to speed with the stuff Google dropped.

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

#759
post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. They may have different revenue models, but there is little difference when it comes down to management killing services which aren't profitable. If there is a difference, it is that Reader could be maintained at little cost, while GCE (when it gets the axe) could potentially be costing google hundreds of millions per year to keep running. There h…

Reader could only be maintained at little cost if its dependencies were stable. But stable infra doesn't get you promoted, so every service needs to be staffed indefinitely (to keep it on the upgrade treadmill) or killed gracefully before prod explodes.

These same arguments can be applied to GCEx 100x more. So the point stands.

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

#760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era. This. A thousand times this! Once hero of the 2000's, Google is turning into the villain; meanwhile Microsoft has embarked on their redemption storyline. Microsoft is a fantastic developer-centric company that has made their pla…

Google cloud head Kurian [1] is a former Oracle executive, how can you expect him to work differently when he has spend decades in oracle. I believe google cloud platform might be slowly turning to be similar to oracle, if things do not change to care more for users. As many people noticed google like oracle started changing their products in such a way as to have lock-in like oracle. So it’s just a matter of time wh…

Additionally, he didn't have a particularly developer friendly reputation at Oracle -- and that's something they'll need within Google to attract the people who will continue to build the pipeline of features they need to attract customers.
Post reply on HN