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Comment by kjw | Hacker News Reader

A move that was necessary. Diane wasn't able to shift the existing Google culture to one where the enterprise customer's needs came first. (Observable as reflected in their pricing, sales, and support challenges.) Thomas now has a similarly tough job navigating the organ rejection risk of transplanting anything that looks like Oracle culture and practices.

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> Diane wasn't able to shift the existing Google culture to one where the enterprise customer's needs came first.

Citation needed -- from my knowledge, the culture shifted dramatically -- she did succeed, and now that's done.

Granted, I'm referring to Google culture within Cloud/GSuite... obviously she didn't affect culture at YouTube or Search because those weren't her areas.

This is completely incorrect. Under Urs'es leadership it was hard to work on enterprise features due to explicit direction from him "we don't support enterprise because it's too hard". Diane completely changed that, developed coherent GCP/G Suite strategy, and now GCP organization is very enterprise-oriented. Hiring of Oracle dude kinda re-iterates this.

Diane Green put GCP firmly on the map as a cloud provider to reckon with.

Sure. But they are in 3rd place. And so very, very far behind AWS in the range of products, quality of service, developer ecosystem, number of regions etc. And while GCP is still focusing on the basics AWS is locking developers into their platform with paradigms like serverless.

And once IBM launches their cloud I would actually put them ahead of GCP given how useful their Compose suite is.

IBM already has a cloud called Bluemix, and they bought/merged Softlayer into it. It's not great.

Compose is just a managed database service which IBM also acquired. I don't see how that alone would put them ahead of any cloud, especially when they're already lacking in infrastructure and software.

They also just acquired a tiny little company called Redhat who I am sure knows a thing or two about infrastructure and software. And Compose is the most useful database offering on any cloud IMHO.

Redhat is tiny compared to the clouds. Softlayer is aging and IBM does not have billions in infrastructure buildout to compete. Redhat can provide software but definitely not enough to put them ahead of GCP as you claim.

And Compose manages databases on AWS and GCP too, similar to Aiven and others, so I don't see how that alone makes IBM special.

Red Hat doesn't know a lot about infrastructure

Not that their infrastructure is insignificant ... but it's insignificant

Yes, but 3rd place is not her fault, but Urs'es, Larry's and Eric's fault. She joined too late to affect that.

IBM's capital spending for cloud infrastructure is a drop in the bucket compared to the big 3 cloud providers. Same with Oracle. They aren't going to be able to compete for big dollars.

"And once IBM launches their cloud"

Interesting. Is it just another rename (Softlayer -> BlueMix -> ?). Or something else?

Given recent news, I would be surprised if the future of IBM's cloud was not based on OpenShift...

It seems that employee backlash against her support of Project Maven may have something to do with it, too:

https://9to5google.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-diane-greene-...

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