Comment by discodave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by discodave | Hacker News Reader

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What makes you say that? Google is 'better' at AI? OK, even if you believe that to be true, like every other market AI will be decided by lots of factors other than who has the 'best' tech. Think VHS vs Beta or Mac vs PC.

They include:

  1. Cost.
  2. Platform/Ecosystem development.
  3. Regulatory compliance (lots of rules if you want to handle health/gov data).
  4. Sales/Marketing (in this case, probably, marketing to enterprises).

I would argue that Amazon is a clear leader in 2-4, and has the history as a low-margin retailer to be competitive in 1.

+1

Google had the best data centers, yet Amazon won the data-center-as-a-service race.

What do you mean by best? In a car race, why would you want to build the best car? I just want my car to cross the finishing line first.

Besides, there is no race. This is continuous evolution. The race has barely started, let alone ended

If you're talking about the "best" datacenters...

Google hit upon the strategy of scale-out-commodity hardware a few years before Amazon did. Also, Google talks more about their infrastructure than Amazon does, so people often think it's "better" from the outside. Whether it is actually better or not is probably an unknowable question from the outside and even if you had all the data it might depend on how you trade off speed, power efficiency, cost etc.

Google is very secretive about its DCs... They appear open, just because they are much more advanced than you can imagine...

My impression is that GCE is relatively young and growing very fast. To say Amazon won seems premature to say the least. This is an active battle.

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