Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

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>Diane also has the experience in her resume as well.

Nothing in her resume actually suggests she had the experience for what Google needed. VMware became popular in a similar way to Redhat, in that it solved a technical issue nobody else was solving at the time. It didn't have explosive growth until EMC took over and with it EMC management style/structure. She was just along for the ride the second the company was sold to EMC.

>What will help Thomas succeed in this role?

He was in a position of power in what is one of the most successful sales organizations in the history of tech. I don't like Oracle, in fact my post history will show that I loathe them. But their salesforce has absolutely dominated the tech industry for 2 decades+. Google needs someone that knows how to sell to enterprise, they don't just need another nerd at the top. Based on my experiences with Diane she was an extremely gifted technical talent and an extremely poor saleswoman and leader.

> until EMC took over and with it EMC management style/structure. She was just along for the ride the second the company was sold to EMC.

This is not true. Diane was the founder of VMware. VMware is a virtualization technology that runs independently of underlying hardware and infrastructure. It could succeed only because it was able to convince its customers and partners that it is neutral to all forms of infrastructure, whether it is compute, networking or storage related. Most of said partners - companies as IBM, HP, Netapp etc. - are direct competitors of EMC.

This is the reason that EMC allowed VMware to operate independently, be listed on the stock exchange as a independent entity and have its own operating culture. And Diane was the main reason that VMware maintained this kind of independence. Source: I was a VMware employee.

The resume I was talking about is, as I see it;

Diane was a founder of VMWare. VMWare was very successful at getting Enterprise customers to convert their massive single use servers into "Liquid IT" where VMWare instances ran the world. NetApp, when I was there, was selling a bunch of NAS into clouds of servers running VMWare. Then she left VMWare and started BeBop, a company that was dedicated to getting Enterprises to move their applications into virtualized compute clusters. When she was acquired/hired by Google is seemed like a slam dunk that she was the person who was going to make Google Cloud the premier service for Enterprise companies to host their infrastructure on.

As I read it, that was very much in line with where Google saw Google Cloud going.

Then we see from the market analysts that Microsoft has (according to the analysts here, I can't really vouch for them) edged Google into third place in the 'Cloud' market by capturing Enterprises moving their applications to the enterprise space.

Then we see Google replacing their head of cloud with a high power sales guy.

And as always, "reading the tea leaves" as an analyst might say, is always an inexact science. So folks outside the situation (like myself) can't know what is really going on.

> Based on my experiences with Diane she was an extremely gifted technical talent and an extremely poor saleswoman and leader.

This seems to be a pretty damning statement, as someone who has direct experience with Diane, what did you see that she could have done differently?

GCP doesn't need to figure out how to sell to enterprises.

They need to offer a better product with more features, support etc. Because adoption within the enterprise isn't driven by the CEO or CTO. It's driven by individual architects and developers.

YMMV widely. It's not at all uncommon to have large software and infrastructure deals signed by CTOs and Business Analyst type people based on advertised product features and compliance certifications, without ever speaking to architects, engineers and implementors about technology fit, compatibility, etc.

Ummmm... no.

Most non software firms consider technology as a cost center. Most don’t care about the technical merits of the platform; all they care is cost and support.

This is why IBM cloud is seeing adoption despite not being as full featured as aws or gcp.

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