Google’s cloud business under Greene was plagued by internal clashes | Hacker News Reader

Google’s cloud business under Greene was plagued by internal clashes

cnbc.com

140 pointskanishkdudeja153 comments

This just feels like an internally contradictory hit piece...

It complains Google wasn't good at sales, but then lists "numerous companies" brought on. It complains that the offerings are "learner than AWS" but then admits Google has shown up "extremely competitively". A competitor (of course) claims "Google is just not a factor" but close to the end the choice becomes a "close call".

So which is it? Considering how late Google got into the cloud game, it seems to be doing respectably well, given all of the catch-up it's needed to do first.

To me that's one ingredient in quality journalism, actually. I feel more confident in a piece if it tries to include multiple points of view, multiple interpretations etc.

Always good to see the "critics said x, but supporters said y" habit as one indicator of impartial reporting.

I want to walk away from an article not with the pre-packaged opinion ofthe journalist/editor but with enough information to make my own decision. I don’t look to journalists for their commentary on the world we live in, but for updates on what is happening.

I think everyone agrees that AWS is a clear leader, but both Microsoft and Google report bundled Office Suite/Cloud Computing revenue as a single number, so it's completely unclear who is actually in second place.

that's a great point, and as i was reading this, i was thinking that perhaps aws should get into cloud office as well.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/19/microsoft-reports-30-1-bi...

As far as I’m aware, azure and office get reported separately. Azure is “intelligent cloud” and office (along with some others) is “more personal computing”

I wish this falsehood would die. Google isn't even #3 in cloud revenues, IBM is, Oracle is #4. Google is far, far, behind Azure and AWS. They have ~$1B/quarter in cloud revenues (that includes GSuite.) Even if you made the assumption that Office 365 made up 80% of Microsoft's quarterly cloud revenues it would still be bigger than Google's cloud (including GSuite.) This is based on their earnings fy 2018.

I don't get why people are in denial that Azure is doing well. If you want to know why Google isn't doing -great- in the cloud, it's because people are afraid they will kill the project. It's because they don't have a "hook" like AWS and Azure have. AWS has a massive user base already, good reason to adopt it. Azure hooks into so many other Microsoft services and developer tools, good reason to adopt it. GCS has...what? Sure, some cool things, but we're talking about compute, compute where where the money is. Even if you adopt GCS for some edge or AI projects, that's not a lot of spend.

I think part of the is ambiguity over what the "cloud" is; is hosted exchange/active directory cloud computing? Is hosted Oracle DBs cloud computing? I think analysts are estimating that 18% of commercial cloud revenue is Azure, which, you're right would put it ahead of Google, but what exactly is getting sold under the Azure umbrella? I'm pretty sure their Active Directory stuff gets sold as part of Azure.

And while this may be splitting hairs, I think it matters what they're actually selling. If they're moving on-prem customers to SaaS, that doesn't seem like a particularly useful comparison, since we already know MS sells a tonne of proprietary software to enterprise.

The answer is, yes hosted Oracle DBs are the "cloud" and yes hosted AD is the "cloud," in so long as they are on a pool of resources. Why wouldn't it be? How is that any different than moving your MEAN, LAMP or whatever stack from bare metal to a cloud provider on a VM? It's not. What makes the "cloud" the "cloud," isn't some serverless, edge, kubernetes fancy whatever. Most people do not use/need that stuff. It's pooled resources and a toolset that allows you to scale, provision, monitor, etc in a simple way with no human interaction. That's it. Everything else is nuance.

I think the ambiguity that people are so inclined to over engineer that they can't possibly imagine something so simple as a vanilla VM with a SQL SaaS hooked to it as "the cloud" because it's not complex enough.

Adding probably legacy businesses into the growing 'new cloud' revenue totals looks like they have more than they say, that's why they do it. Amazon cloud only started with aws, they don't have 30 year workloads from ancient companies moved to a cloud. It matters because you are hiding the new part from the legacy part, legacy is probably shrinking in general. It makes microsoft look much larger.

you can argue that running active directory in a cloud vm is still in the cloud - yes, but that's not the same kind of growth because that entire old windows market is static at best.

> GCS has...what?

The best Kubernetes hosting?

A tool that arguably 99% of people don't need and is even up for constant debate here on HN.

tool made by google runs best on google cloud. more at 11

> If you want to know why Google isn't doing -great- in the cloud, it's because people are afraid they will kill the project.

Spot on, and it is a sentiment I come across more than once every year. The number of startups hosted on AWS is huge, MS Azure is currently runner-up and Google a distant third.

Are those contradictory points? Lots of companies may not be good enough to count as “good.” If Walmart sold $10 million worth of goods its both numerous and bad.

The leaner than AWS comment was when he made the decision in the past and the close call comment was more recent.

The question isn’t whether you or I are happy with Goohle’s performance but how management and investors see it.

> Considering how late Google got into the cloud game, it seems to be doing respectably well, given all of the catch-up it's needed to do first.

Google is still at 3% market share which puts it at the same level as IBM Soft Layer and Rackspace. [0] Given the technologies Google has developed for cloud-native/cloud-scale computing (Kubernetes, MapReduce, TensorFlow, etc.) not to mention outstanding apps like Gmail, this result has to be a disappointment to their investors.

[0] https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/microsof...

I'd argue it's still way too early to call it a disappointment, and that we'll only know 5-10 years from now.

Google had to invest massively to catch up to AWS purely technically, and it's only now that people are starting to consider it to be close. Then consider that companies will tend to pick a cloud provider and not revisit that decision for 5 or 10 years.

This has to be a very long-term play where the results won't show up for many, many years. Greene's tenure should be judged in terms of market perception (e.g. if we were making the decision now instead of 10 years ago, would Google be viable?) as opposed to a large absolute increase in market share (so check back 10 years from now).

The margins may well have shrunk significantly by the time the "long-term" materializes though.

Cloud computing seems to me like an industry at high-risk of being commotitized after the initial gold rush -- similar to smartphones. If that's the case, I'm not sure it makes sense to prioritize the future over today.

"Commotitized" is not synonymous with low profit. There are at least a half dozen oil companies doing a few billion/qrt in profit.

Are smartphones really a commodity, when people spend hundreds of dollars more on the iPhone vs. Android competitors? With any platform certain aspects will become commotitized, but when you have to choose between building on one ecosystem or another, there will always be room for differentiation.

I tend to agree.

I've been a GCP customer for ~18 months and as recent as a year ago it still felt like very early days for sales and support. Well, actually it still feels like early days for support. The products, however, have been surprisingly good for the most part and seem more mature and well-engineered than their market share would suggest, especially in comparison to Azure.

So, I'm of the opinion that if they can figure out how to sell, they'll do quite well.

They need to figure out how to be code complete and ship it, not yap about vaporware that AWS has had for years.

Such as?

While this is just my personal opinion, I view AWS, Azure and GCP as follows:

1. AWS is the clear market leader, tons of services, good support options, but you'll need pretty expert-level ops people to make sure everything is working together securely. You may have to build more plumbing than you think. 2. Azure is great for companies that are already MS shops and it makes lots of MS tech (.Net, SQL Server) super easy to use in the cloud. 3. If I were starting a startup, I would go with GCP. IMO their services are easier to use with a smaller ops team, and they have lots of services that scale more easily as you grow (e.g. Cloud Spanner). But not as good enterprise-level support.

I see lots of excitement for GCP in the startup scene, and as these startups become more mature I think the "enterprise-level"-ness of GCP will improve.

The complexity of AWS is exactly why it is so successful.

It is being pushed by both outside consultants and employees who become the experts within the enterprise. GCP's ease of use is a disadvantage in the big picture.

This is a pragmatic and astute observation. This scenario has played out several times in the past.

> This scenario has played out several times in the past.

What examples come to mind?

Oracle.

That is what makes Oracles cloud play such a mystery. They had a huge asset in a loyal corps of Oracle DBAs embedded in every large organisation on the planet. Now they are saying “fire those guys and we’ll host your databases”. But maybe those guys will say “nah, Postgres is actually all we need, see ya”.

Oracle had no choice. They had to disrupt their own business or someone else would do it to them.

Right, but they could have upskilled/cross-trained the DBAs to be cloud guys, offered training, certificates, conferences, yadda yadda. Instead they chose to stab their strongest advocates in the back!

A smart executive (ha!) would announce that next year’s bonus pool would be funded by savings on Oracle licences then sit back and let nature take its course...

VMware

Enterprises tend to buy full IT offerings including apps and services, not just IaaS. Having a big partner network, which VMware does, is a competitive advantage. Amazon and Azure likewise have large partner ecosystems.

Disclaimer: I work for VMware.

Netware

Bloomberg terminals

GCP is not less complex. It just appears (but is not actually) better organized and documented. You still need an operations army to fill in feature gaps or go beyond anything that is not default, which are the much bigger problems. At least on AWS you can hack it to do what you need, on GCP some things you just cannot do.

What's an example of an intractable problem you ran into on GCP?

Maintenance windows that don't cause downtime? This was even discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871931

Read the last description: "amateur and unprofessional." The same thing happens for Kubernetes Engine. Does Google internally run their Cadillac infra like this? Of course not. The conclusion is either they don't care about their external cloud or that team can't ship basic features.

I'm not sure I follow you here: for GCE, there are no "maintenance windows", the vast majority of maintenance is carried out via live migration and the user doesn't even notice.

Yes, on rare occasion there's an unplanned failure (host error) and the VM has to be restarted elsewhere, but this is the only option for maintenance at AWS.

Mandatory disclaimer: I work at GCP.

One example fitting GP description would be Cloud SQL maintenance windows. Unavoidable downtime as far as I know (even with HA)

As asey correctly points out, the link I posted talks about the Cloud SQL maintenance window, not about Compute Engine. That there is unavoidable downtime even with HA has been a problem known for seven months at this point. A Cloud SQL TL even sought feedback here with people telling that person this is a "dealbreaker" and another saying it doesn't even make sense to have built HA for a low probability event (zone outage) before dealing with this much higher probability event:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=flamingcow

This is pretty strong customer feedback. What happened with this feedback, anything? The bigger picture here about GCP, preceded by Google's long reputation, is that customer feedback means nothing. Googlers are probably still building what they feel like building, and that is why AWS continues to trot ahead despite being less polished. They ship things that work and they know what their customers want.

FWIW if you're depending on something to be up in a single availability zone, you're already doing cloud wrong.

GCP is only easy to use because it has no features compared to AWS.

Large shops seem to love complexity and mistake it for flexibility while constantly complaining about how complicated things are to integrate. It puzzles me how the culture seems to keep adopting stuff so complicated that only those with an army of consultants and massive resources could do the same thing while most start-ups look at the same problems, find a solution that gets the problem solved sufficiently and then build things that actually solve real problems instead of self-inflicted ones like dealing with the complexities of cross-account permission structures via AWS IAM and S3 bucket policies interacting with SSO.

I’m not entirely convinced that the F500 would adopt GCP if they had the support and hand-holding structure that they have historically demanded. Myself, I’d rather find a solution that doesn’t need such a team to support me in the first place. Sure, there’s all sorts of issues with partners’ service offerings and the high cost of transit between multiple cloud providers but perhaps you can save the costs of support and put it toward network instead (won’t solve the transit costs for your partners though).

Assuming you are correct and Google invested heavily that seems to rule out strong profits from GCS at this time.

So what exactly is it that Google is doing now that will lead to long-term profitability in a business where revenue is closely tied to scale? Can Google really prevail over Amazon (first mover) and MS Azure (great enterprise chops + Office) based on capital investment alone? Amazon and Azure are not standing still. Both also have an order of magnitude advantage in market share. Finally GCS is not strong in the big growth markets in Asia.

For my money Google's best bet is to stay in the game and hope something alters the market in a way that weakens their competitors. That assumes they can double down on the investment to remain viable and recognize the opportunity before others do.

First, Google doesn't need to prevail, it just needs to get a sizeable enough chunk of the market to make a profit. E.g. even if it's an eternal long-term 33% to AWS, Azure and GCP, it's a rational investment for Google. The market's big enough.

Second, Google is clearly betting that its scale will indeed give it a benefit -- the scale of its data centers which include all of Search and everything else (e.g. raw costs for computing and storage being cheaper than competitors), the scale of its investments in machine learning which it makes available on GCP, the scale of its investments in private networking and security, etc. Part of Google's pitch is that it's providing Google-class security and networking which AWS and Azure simply can't match.

even if it's an eternal long-term 33% to AWS, Azure and GCP, it's a rational investment for Google

They would need to grow their marketshare ten-fold to be in that position, and they would need to defeat Alibaba on its home turf. It’s not going to happen. GCP could possibly drive IBM and Oracle out of the cloud market, but even that’s unlikely.

No, five years ago, it would have been too early to call it a disappointment. Now, it is a disappointment, and there will not be 5-10 years for this to course correct, probably only 1-2 years -- if they play the Kubernetes card perfectly.

There is an extra dose of disappointment because on technical merits, GCP's basic VM substrate -- Compute Engine and Cloud Storage -- is far superior to AWS even five years ago, but AWS kept their ear to the street, anticipated every managed service and ancillary feature that their customers could have wanted, and executed relentlessly. Google has not mounted even half as vigorous and urgent a response as needed under the circumstances.

There is nothing at the outset that would prevent someone from choosing GCP, many might even be predisposed given the reputation of Google's own infrastructure, but when more and more of the tasks that you might want to offload to cloud are still not available or not reliably working on GCP, and you're stuck with operating VM's, you might seriously consider the competitor, and once that decision is made, you are not coming back.

It's an execution, and perhaps cultural, problem with Google, not one of technology or market.

My take on GCP is that they have focus areas like Kubernetes, Spanner, Firebase that they do very well on, but for more generic offerings not so much.

For instance, our app uses Postgres 10's native partitioning features, it's REALLY strange to me that Cloud SQL is still on PG 9.6. They also don't communicate effectively on when / if they'll add it which makes planning difficult. AWS on the other hand is already testing PG 11 and has an open schedule in place to their customers can plan ahead.

None of these are contradictory. Numerous companies brought on then found the offerings were not up to par of AWS. And as one of only three major well known cloud providers they are competitive enough as to be a close call when counting pricing advantages, but still have very small market share and therefore not a factor were they to disappear -- people would just move to AWS.

Google is better than Amazon at engineering and product design so they should be able to beat AWS. My impression from trying GCE is that, like many other Google products that they end up killing off, they’ve never been fully committed to it.

Why is that contradictory? You can bring numerous companies on, for whatever reason, without being good at sales. The marketshare remains very low because of it, even though the overall market has grown.

Interesting, I'm in the US and I think of GCP as the best of the three factoring cost and reliability of their features.

For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings.

For Google you may not want to get locked in, but the offerings seem to offer some really good benefits and work correctly.

Maybe this is just "grass is greener" thinking, but what is the experience using GCP like?

I’ve only been using GCP for a few weeks now, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

So far, I really enjoy how the UI seems consistent, compared to AWS where different products seem like they are from a completely different service.

As for the products themselves, everything just works. For their Kubernetes platform, GKE, they provide an excellent UI to do almost anything. Auto scaling any workloads, deploying new workloads all through the UI (no manual YAML creation), performing rolling updates, it all just works.

Their Stackdriver product automatically logs all output from your GKE pods, and can even alert you with a concise summary of crashing errors (I caught a couple panics from a Go service with it).

Overall I’d say it’s been great so far, and much cheaper than AWS. I haven’t used Azure in any capacity, so I’m unsure how it would stack up.

> So far, I really enjoy how the UI seems consistent, compared to AWS where different products seem like they are from a completely different service.

There is a reason for this. AWS moves early and moves quickly. Whereas Google may wait until a product is perfectly designed AWS gets it out in beta in one region and then expands from there.

And they bring this pace to product improvement which is pretty amazing: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/

I hear the opposite from most people, that gcp moves more quickly and has alpha and beta products and aws doesn't. So this confused me.

It just depends on which provider you have an enterprise relationship with. They all have a bunch of closed alpha/betas that you simply need to ask your account manager to join.

AWS has Preview products which are released to the public and they handle rollout on a region by region basis.

AWS has 10x the number of products of GCP and still maintains a rapid pace.

Nothing but good experience with GCP, and fast response times from their customer support. Was surprised to see that it was perceived as "failing"

Our experience with GKE has been excellent.

EDIT: I should also add that our account sales team have been outstanding. We are not (yet) a big customer - but they have been very responsive to our questions. My take is they are trying very hard to be enterprise friendly.

> For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings.

So our company spends tens of millions a month with AWS across our 50+ teams.

Never once heard of AWS services not working and never once saw people needing to roll their own replacement Redis, PostgreSQL or ElasticSearch instances. And at least with AWS you have options to have these managed services where as the product offering from GCP is extremely limited. Not to mention that GCP is absent entirely from the serverless discussion which is a game changer.

Can you be more specific as to why GCP implements things correctly and AWS doesn't ?

> Not to mention that GCP is absent entirely from the serverless discussion which is a game changer.

Can you clarify what you mean here?

Arent GAE and FireBase part of GCP which are both very much serverless products?

And GCF

GCP does have limited Cloud Functions available, and is now working on Serverless Containers* product to let you run any container.

I'd recommend taking a look at App Engine.

I've got services that have been running on there untouched for years.

Really amazing especially how gae can scale from 0 to 1 instances quickly.

Simple: Kubernetes.

GCP turns out to be more expensive for stuff like databases because they don't give out committed use and yearly pricing.

So, as far as I always understood, there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space. UPS and FedEx, Coca Cola and Pepsi, Oracle and MSSQL, etc.

From my professional perspective (integration specialist of a database vendor), all enterprises are either going to AWS or Azure. I think this is almost inevitable: the differences between the clouds are simply not big enough to make a difference from an executive's perspective, so to manage risk, you either go with what you know (Azure) or the market leader (AWS).

Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete.

I just don't see this happening under their new cloud leadership (former Oracle, sales-oriented exec). It would have to be driven by massive innovation, not by "doing the same stuff as AWS but then slightly better/cheaper".

What are HN's thought about this?

(Obligatory disclaimer: on a personal level I absolutely love Google Cloud and think it's a much more developer-friendly environment, but professionally I just can't make a strong case for why, say, a financial institution should use Google Cloud rather than AWS or Azure.)

EDIT: Did not expect this topic to be downvoted this far. Is this not an appropriate discussion / violate any rules?

[1] "Law of Duality" https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/d...

1. Google will do this anyway, because it's not going to run on AWS or azure, so why not keep some skin in the game?

2. Isn't k8s a play to reinvent this space?

Kubernetes also run on the competing clouds, so it isn't that much of an advantage, unless they add GCE specific features.

Well, they do. For example you can configure your node pool to automatically upgrade its members so you don't have to worry about kernel patches. They have a proxy service for their Cloud SQL product so you don't have to fiddle with configuration, its just another k8s service name. Of course Amazon could do these things but they simply haven't. I think their biggest advantage though is they abstract away the master - you just have a node pool and don't have to worry about the masters. With Amazon you will pay $300 a month just to have a HA master, before you launch even one node in your pool.

Also once you start getting into k8s you will find so much more information in the community with specific instructions for GKE; its by far the best environment to learn in for that reason.

Google falls down in so many other areas though that it probably doesn't matter how good GKE is. The biggest annoyance to me is their Postgres offering still has no point in time recovery.

edit to add: One other big advantage I forgot to mention is that launching a GKE cluster takes only a couple of minutes. I have a Terraform configuration that will launch a GKE cluster and run my deployments and my app is up and running after less than 5 minutes. This makes it much more attractive to do things like spin up a new cluster for each pull request.

EKS pricing is $0.20/hour, or ~ $144/month. Not free, but also not $300.

I will agree that EKS startup is slow, but given the way it needs to run, I don’t think many customers will want to run more than a few clusters per VPC.

$144 a month gets you one master. As I said, an HA master is twice that. If you want to compare to GKE, you are starting at $288 a month.

The only master for EKS is an HA master (to be precise a 3 AZ master).

Not sure where these numbers are coming from but EKS has 3 masters by default. You don't get HA by running 2 clusters (I assume that's where you got $288). $144 gets you 3 masters in 3 AZs.

1. Because it is a very different thing to have an internally managed cloud than it is to offer this as a product with the massive support required for enterprise, something that Google has never put much resource into.

Amazon and MS have vast support networks because enterprise wants to feel like they have some control and feedback on their systems.

Also, unless you can innovate in the space (or go really cheap), why would I ever choose a smaller player over a larger one?

This is another example of the problem these rich companies have where cash is not a problem but identity and direction is.

I completely agree with this.

But, also in think Google does have some advantages. Out of the box, their NLP algorithms seem much better than AWS’s offering. They also offer custom search as an api. I haven’t used it, but bigquery seems very good. I do agree these are probably not enough to have an enterprise shift. Maybe if they specialize on a couple industries that won’t choose amazon (fedex, ups, target, Walmart, streaming/media). It does seem like google has made strong inroads in finance as well.

There are technical reasons.

Azure is doing quite well leveraging Microsoft's existing enterprise relationships. I'm not sure how much success folks are having "lifting and shifting" their Microsoft infrastructure into the cloud, some, maybe?

However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.

>However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.

Extremely unsurprising, but I'd be interested to read more.

Kind of ignored this because it's a long list of stuff. I don't really want to repeat stuff that I've "heard". Friend of mine does consulting for a few big orgs, and he tells me that things are bad enough that many of his customers are looking to move in spite of being heavily subsidized by Microsoft. He mentioned numbers like >$1m in credits. Unfortunately, my friend isn't very technical so when I press him on details, I get very little.

However, that correlates pretty closely with my own personal experience. I've worked with a fair bit of the Azure products and it feels to me very much like a work in progress.

The identity management stuff has been a moving target since day one. That is, how to authorize against the service itself. This is apparent in many of the Python libraries where this is documented.

The Python libraries that I've seen look like they were produced by interns. I'm performance with ADL is pretty rough.

My main goal with Azure was to deploy Kubernetes clusters there. The list of problems is very long and has been documented ad nauseum in many Medium articles. In the 14 or so months I've been working with Azure, it hasn't improved as quickly as I'm accustomed to with AWS and GCP.

A year ago, I shifted the majority of my production infrastructure from AWS to GCP. By comparison to Azure, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the products from GCP. My company uses GSuite which made identity management and RBAC a breeze. The GKE product is way, way better than anything else, and there are a handful of things that I like better than AWS.

I wouldn't encourage anyone to shift from AWS unless they were planning a large Kubernetes implementation. I would encourage folks to try GCP and especially GKE to get a sense of the differences.

There's nothing about Azure that I've discovered yet that would cause me to recommend it to anyone. It's possible that if a company had a heavier investment in MS products that it might be worthwhile, but that's not the case for mine. We only ever use MSSQL occasionally for development purposes and I've found that I can spin up an instance of that quite nicely in k8s with the Microsoft authored helm chart.

k8s feels much more like an effort to commoditize this space through standardization. It's a pretty common business strategy [1].

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement

This "law of duality" is not very convincing. He does not offer criteria where it applies not does he argue why it would apply for the examples given. How does his adoption curve apply to coke?

Especially in the cloud market, I see rather more players in the future as the underlying technologies become commercially available or even commodity.

In the other side customers value support and services, which does not scale well, and smaller players have an advantage.

seems really poorly defined and argued

Here are the author's examples:

>McDonalds and Burger King

McDonald's is far larger than BK. Also Wendy's is larger than BK according to this source: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/qsr50-2017-top-50-chart

>GM and Ford

Another non-example. We just gonna pretend toyota doesn't exist?

>Nike and Reebok

Again, wtf? Even when reebok stood alone, there was still Adidas in the picture. Not a duality

Or indeed VW Group - which, as least as of last year, was the biggest car company:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38793253

You should try to understand the point and the context of these examples. I would suggest you read Al Ries books.

These examples were picked in the early 1990s, and are specific to the US market. Things change.

For example the US car market has long been largely dominated by GM and Ford with Toyota only recently breaking that (and VW is non-existent). GM and Ford are still the two largest manufacturers: https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufact...

The point is that there is usually very few dominating brands in a market, with the top 2 (approximately) yielding the power and the others following and filling the gaps.

> These examples were picked in the early 1990s, and are specific to the US market. Things change.

...like whether that claim is well founded or not.

In the tech sector this has often reduced to 1 single brand instead of 2.

The worst mistake we engineers tend to make is to dismiss the 'wisdom' of professional marketers and branding experts...

It’s incumbent on you to make your point with contemporary examples or heavily explain why old ones are needed (and even then it severely weakens the point). I too was extremely confused with your examples.

Sure there should be charity in reading but the default assumption is not that your examples are 26 years old. Many people here were either children or not even born yet.

It's odd to see the traditional industry of the "big three" automakers being used as evidence for the "law of duality"...

It's not odd when you look at the link I posted that shows that the 3rd of the "Big Three" was much smaller than the other 2 in terms of volume and brand.

In 1990, GM had 35%, Ford 23%, and Chrysler 12% of the US market. That doesn't seem like an overwhelming dominance by GM and Ford.

There's several aspects here.

I quite agree that if Google does not get into the top 2 it will likely be irrelevant in that market.

The other aspect, as discussed in the article, is that this is a completely new market and way of doing business for Google, which seems to create a clash of cultures. If that is indeed the case it may be extremely difficult for Google to overcome.

"The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" is a must-read, by the way, as is the one on branding.

"Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete."

How naive would it be to say there's such potential in Firebase? It seems so different from what's out there now, and Google's putting a lot of effort and resources into it now too (including sunsetting existing products like Google Analytics Mobile in favor of the Firebase versions.)

and when is firebase going to be sunset for the newer shinier thing? google has a huge problem with sunsetting services that work for something marginally better

I’m not sure I agree with the rule of two. Industries typically consolidate over time. Also, anti-trust rules typically prevent a rule of one. Several industries have had multiple competitors thrive though. Banking would be a good example of this where Citi, JPM, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are competing in a landscape where many more competed 15 years ago. Automotives have consolidated, but there’s still more than two. I would also throw IBM into the MSFT and Oracle 90’s enterprise comparison. I think one of the biggest advantages of Google cloud as a business is the fact that most retailers will refuse to use AWS and more retailers are building out their technical abilities.

I've also mentioned in another comment but in the market where I'm located (Eastern Europe) the Google Cloud sales-people are totally absent while MS has been very, very insistent in pushing Azure down people's throats. I think Google was expecting their cloud solution to be similar to how AdWords + Search worked for them, i.e. that they would need close to no sales-people down in the trenches because the product would almost sell by itself based on its technical merits alone, but apparently (as you well mention) the different cloud implementations are not that, well, different between them so it all comes down to which company was first in the market (AWS) and which company has got the best and most aggressive sales-people (MS).

so it all comes down to which company was first in the market (AWS) and which company has got the best and most aggressive sales-people (MS).

That is not it at all. What typically happens is an organisation will run a pilot project and see how it goes. On Azure it’s easy to speak to a real person, and they will be knowledgeable and take you seriously, and be empowered and willing to help you. On Google even if you manage to speak to anyone, they’ll treat you like an idiot. Guess who that organisation is going to go to for bigger and bigger projects?

My thoughts are that I don't know anyone that's adopted Azure at scale that are happy with the service.

N=1, YMMV, etc.

Google cloud seems to be a better fit for startups while azure is for larger non-tech firms. I can’t imagine a new startup ever choosing azure over gcloud or aws and i can’t imagine some random all-microsoft insurance company choosing gcloud over azure.

" as far as I always understood, there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space"

The '22-laws-of-marketing' are not 'laws' - they're just called that by profs trying to hustle a book.

It's a great book that everyone, especially Engineers should read, but it's not necessarily factual.

There can be many 'leaders' it depends on the industry.

Google is no slouch, they have a differentiated offer that may appeal to different kinds of orgs, particularly startups.

To your own point: 'developer friendly' ... Google may be a choice for devs building 'cloud first' solutions, and the primary basis for could based companies. Remember that AWS and Azure have a lot of customers just porting over old-school software onto cloud instances. They need virtual instances in quantity and classic, straight forward easy ways to manage them. Not fancy new cloud gear.

Cloud is big, and there's a lot of growth, moreover, as more services go cloud and we move away from legacy installations ... Google might even possibly have an advantage.

As others have noted, hype from random marketing book != actual laws of anything.

If I was starting a startup today, I’d choose Google Cloud. They’re a bit cheaper than AWS, they have all the big types of cloud services you need, and they tend to be more simple/plug-and-play than AWS, requiring less Ops expertise to manage. GKE is awesome, Big Query is easier to manage than Redshift, PubSub easier to both manage and use than Kinesis, if you ever want a truly global database Google has that while AWS doesn’t, etc. AWS has a larger product catalogue, and is more configurable for big enterprises with huge Ops/security teams, but for a startup that has mostly dev and little Ops expertise, I’d choose Google Cloud.

The rule might feel true as a consequence of Zipf's law that says the second biggest is roughly half as big, and the third biggest is 1/3 as big as #1, etc. So because of a power law, the #1 and #2 are big enough that many people will just dismiss the rest.

Eventually All internet company will love and move to gcp. i.e. snap or Netflix or Salesforce or slack etc. All enterprise company will move to internet company. Google wins.

The law of duality just seems to be Zipf's law with an arbitrary cutoff at #2...

> there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space

The problem with this “rule” is it’s a tautology. Any ordered list of N > 1 will have two leaders. (The better question, how are market shares distributed, is difficult to precisely answer given the inherent subjectivity of delineating markets.)

In the US Google is often referred to as part of the "big 3", but my understanding is GCP is globally in 4th place behind AWS, Azure and Alibaba cloud.

Alibaba is extremely dominant in South-East Asia and if you're doing any work in Indonesia, and Malaysia in particular which have "data sovereignty" regulations, they are the only game in town. AWS and Azure have some inroads (both have AZs in Japan, Korea, Singapore, HK and mainland China) but GCP is nowhere distinctively interesting (unless you want to do something in Taiwan I guess?).

So at least if you're trying to roll out in Asia there's really little reason to even consider GCP. You'd go Alibaba if you want the dominant regional player and AWS or Azure if that's what you use everywhere else.

GCP has zones in India, Singapore, HK, Taiwan and Tokyo (+ Osaka planned). https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/

Disclaimer: I work at Google, am technically part of Cloud, do not work on anything related to GCP.

And Jakarta is also planned!

(I _do_ work for GCP)

Cool. Any idea what products will be available in Jakarta region? Will App Engine be available?

it looks like at least from here https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/

Gcp has as many if not more presence in Asia ? What am I missing?

The only one in South-East Asia that AWS and Azure don't have is Taiwan.

My point is they are trailing, so they need to do something more than having the same locations as the others. They need something distinctive to have any sort of edge.

Regarding regionality, I would say that they're mostly on-par. Googles POP's set it above the others because from a pure network perspective getting into their POP (and thus; dark fibre backbone) is helping cover being a bit further away with the actual compute.

AWS in China is not "really" AWS in the way that most people assume it is. It's almost in name only as you can't just pick a chinese datacenter and have it working. It's a coordinated effort, they're not owned by Amazon and it doesn't have the full complement of services.

On your main point about GCP being one of the big 3, I would (strongly) argue that if you took office365 out of the equation then Azure would look pretty anaemic in comparison to GCP.

Microsoft loves talking about its cloud platform which combines the Azure Directory (AD in Cloud), o365 and their actual provisioning systems. Google has started doing this too under the "Google Cloud" umbrella term; but when you consider the sheer volume of Enterprises being almost forced to upgrade to o365 and Azure Directory- (from their Exchange/AD/sharepoint on-prem installations) you can start to understand why Azure looks as if it's dominating.

Exactly this. Microsoft was brilliant to leverage o365 to not just boost their numbers with Azure AD but also to get a cloud provider effectively approved by a company’s security department in an enterprise “under the radar”. What security team/department is going to say “no” to the only reasonable upgrade path? Even better in a decent sized multi-national this is often done at the global/core/shared service level so you suddenly have a vetted and pre-approved cloud provider at the global level for all of these other operating companies.

I view the former as a shady number boost but combined with the latter the only conclusion is that Microsoft is still the cunning strategists we thought they might not be anymore. It’s genius really and not only shows how much they get enterprises but how ruthlessly they’ll take advantage of that knowledge and the enterprise inroads they have.

"GCP is globally in 4th place behind AWS, Azure and Alibaba cloud."

Maybe GCP should be renamed to something beginning with 'A'?

Alphabet Cloud?

Needs a pithy TLA. Alphabet Business Cloud / ABC?

Probably will end up in 5th place once IBM + Redhat + Compose gets their talked about on-premise/cloud hybrid cloud running.

Diane Greene is and never was a good executive to lead an enterprise business. She is more of a technologist/scientist and better at small/medium sized businesses.

She built VMware which was a great technology but stupidly sold to EMC for $60M, leaving a lot of money on the table. EMC rightly fired her because she couldn’t scale and replaced her with Paul Maritz who was more suitable for this job.

The idea that she could handle a large and diverse org like GCP was a gamble at best, and it looks like it lost, again.

That’s a little harsh. I mean hindsight is always 20-20. Under her leadership Google Cloud did acquire big name customers. Google’s struggle to gain foothold in enterprises and reasons are well discussed on various HN threads over years. It’s a lot to expect from one executive to turn it around in face of fierce competition.

No, that's exactly what should be expected from a CEO.

And she did deliver, a lot[0].

After Diane took over the reins, Google Cloud managed to get solid enterprise wins. 20th Century Fox, Colgate, Disney, eBay, HSBC, LATAM Airlines, LG CNS, The Home Depot, The New York Times, Schlumberger, Target and Verizon are some of the key enterprises using Google Cloud.

The most notable win for Google Cloud came from Twitter which has moved large-scale Hadoop clusters to GCP, with a total of about 300 PB of data migrated.

Netflix, a loyal AWS customer, is using Google Cloud Platform for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Google Cloud made impressive progress in establishing itself as an enterprise cloud platform.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-...

She should of at least help Google Cloud out-compete Microsoft, which apparently they didn't. And I can partially see why, because in the market where I'm located (Eastern-Europe, a reasonably well-developed IT market) MS has become very, very aggressive in selling Azure, it has been that way for the last 3 years (I'd say), for them it's "sell Azure first and then everything else will follow", while I haven't even heard of Google Cloud being mentioned as a cloud alternative because their sales people are missing. For the record I know people who sell IT solutions for both enterprise and Government entities.

Maybe in the States or in other parts of Europe the situation is different and Google does indeed push their cloud solution down clients' throats but over-here they're absent.

Europe a separate discussion from the US, as far as I know the problem is that Google refuses to sign any kind of guarantees that the data doesn't leave the EU. Probably because hosting companies that have US DCs can be compelled to give up data from EU datacenters too by the USgovt.

Microsoft does give those guarantees, it has a weird setup with Deutsche Telekom operating their datacenters.

So institutions like universities can't necessarily use Google cloud services. Even consultancies aren't necessarily so hot on providing Google cloud stuff, as some customers can't use them. All this, however, is anecdotal.

You can read more on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16858597

Yes, but this setup with Deutsche Telekom will end in 2019 and does not accept new customers.

People underestimate Microsoft’s clout. Microsoft has massive enterprise distribution network[0] and “Microsoft Certified Partners”. Basically there are technical consultants who goes around recommending MS offerings to their clients while collecting commissions from MS. It worked for Office, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, and now it’s working for Azure as well.

Google Cloud is new vendor & it’s very unlikely that they’ll surpass MS anytime soon.

Microsoft collected $9.5 billion in Azure cloud revenue in 2018, vs. $1.6 billion for the comparable Google business, according to investment bank KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. Next year, KeyBanc forecasts, it’ll be $15.1 billion for Microsoft, $3.2 billion for Google. Of course, in a market expected to top $40 billion next year, third place in the U.S. isn’t so bad. Still, “Google is way back,” says Brent Bracelin, an analyst at KeyBanc who co-authored the report. “They don’t have enterprise sales distribution,” he says. “That’s their big Achilles’ heel. Microsoft has a massive footprint there.”

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/google-ma...

Azure is somewhere between 2 and 4 times as expensive as Google cloud. If you stop doing a stupid revenues comparison like all articles are doing and factor that pricing difference, then you will realize that google is more successful.

I work for one of those listed "key enterprises". Google Cloud spend is <1/10000th of what we spend on AWS. Google Cloud is used to pressure AWS to build features and negotiate pricing. Nothing critical runs on there, just some POCs and emergency failovers. I believe our Azure use also eclipses our Google use.

When you're mega enterprise sized, you pretty much use every cloud provider and service, but they're nowhere near equally used.

To quote Don Draper, that’s what the money is for.

FYI, 90% of your comments are insta-dead and invisible to most users since Nov 2017. I’m not sure why a few of them are allowed through. The 3 you posted after this one were all dead, so I had to go back this far to reply.

I'm not sure I agree, at least not for the reasons stated.

There are many reasons why VM might have sold for what it did and 'money' is only part of the equation. She would not have made the decision alone, there'd be good bankers and investors at the table, who'd have some insight if it was a 'stupid' move.

Greene might have been a great choice for Google if Google were ready for it.

It seems there was an existential struggle over some issues, particularly the Military Contract thing. I feel sorry for both Sundar and Diane because it's a very tough one: there are ethnical issues, but also cultural and brand. If a good chunk of G staff really don't want to have military contracts ... well it's going to be a problem. That said, some people might feel the opposite (!), i.e. America may have issues but ultimately is a force for 'good' or at least they provide the safe, open and fair means literally for Google to exist. I'm not making arguments here, just pointing to how thorny that one is.

And of course trying to change culture (Enterprise Sales, Customer Orientation, Service and Support) to a company that has none of that ... is going to be hard.

AWS and MS are infinitely more suited to it.

It may very well be a better decision for G Cloud to simply carve out a piece of the cloud that suits their natural advantages and dynamics, as opposed to trying to appease GM, Mondelez and Barclay's IT teams.

> America may have issues but ultimately is a force for 'good' or at least they provide the safe, open and fair means literally for Google to exist. I'm not making arguments here, just pointing to how thorny that one is.

You're making a statement. You are saying "America is ultimately a force for good". America is definitely a force for the good of a certain set of humans. Whether it is a force for the good of the world (ie: the full set of humans on the planet) is certainly very questionable, especially in recent years.

I specifically said 'some people may feel the opposite i.e. America is a force for good'.

I'm not making a statement, I'm indicating that some may feel the opposite of the much touted group of G staff who don't want to do Mil Contracts.

To be clear, I do think America is a force for good ... but still not sure if G should work on Mil contracts, I think it depends on the case. Intelligence gathering, AI in general, maybe communications, but I certainly wouldn't be supportive of designing weapons systems, or imagine things like 'first strike Nuclear weapons capabilities'. I don't think the line is arbitrary. I respect that everyone has feelings about that so my point is: it's tough for Sundar and Diane.

Um, VMWare sold in 2003 for USD$635m. Add nearly 15 years worth of inflation (plus current tech hype) and I’d say that was very much a successful “unicorn”. They were just recovering from the dot come bubble then. So valuations weren’t as lofty as many have been in recent years.

https://www.cnet.com/news/emc-acquires-server-specialist-vmw...

I personally didn't understand their niche until I went to work for a county school district and saw how embedded they were. Surprisingly there are a lot of business opportunities to sell to school districts if you are GCP friendly. Unfortunately the sales model is very phobic to monthly subscriptions, which doesn't fit the cloud very well.

Could you elaborate on your experience? I’ve heard a lot about how well google got into schools with gdocs and chrome books but I’ve never heard much more.

> ...while AWS and Microsoft are geared toward serving customers and responding quickly to their requests, Google touts its own technology, selling what it thinks clients need.

This sums it up, and is the core problem with GCP.

Unfortunately the replacement CEO is the person who ran Oracle Cloud, which is far worse currently than GCP. The future does not look bright.

The primary issue is Google’s complete lack of knowledge and apathy regarding Enterprise sales. I’m sure they have plenty of employees with experience and understanding of the Enterprise business but their entire culture and management layer is way too heavily weighted toward engineering to successfully sell to the Enterprise. Slootman was probably right in that Google needs a major aquisition to bring in a global sales culture rather than trying to build it from scratch. And then the old guard needs to not crush that culture. Activist employees won’t make it any easier to grow their Enterprise business as every company in the world has things you can protest about.

Perhaps Google should focus on undercutting Amazon and Micosoft at the low end while building up their cloud capabilities and Enterprise sales culture. And then really go after the large customers 2 years from now.

Amazon/Microsoft will happily price match Google for enterprise customers when there's overlap in offerings because they can still profit off their far larger selection of unique offerings.

I keep hearing that Google seems to be lacking in the enterprise sales area, but from what I’ve heard, G Suite seems to be doing quite well. What explains that?

G Suite basically sells itself and doesn’t really require an enterprise sales force in the traditional sense. This works because G Suite is implemented from the bottom up, i.e. individuals and workgroups begin using G Suite and then pressure management to adopt it department/company wide.

This is very different from large scale enterprise software or infrastructure sales (cloud in this case) where you need to respond to RFPs, establish a relationship with the C suite, run POCs tailored to the customer’s particular use cases, present a compelling product roadmap, convince the customer that you’re in it for the long term partnership, etc. These are not things Google currently excels at.

To be succeeded by Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle... (for 12 years!)

Now I know nothing about the man, and Google definitely needs to learn how to deal with enterprise customers.

But this doesn't exactly fill me with hope.

To be fair the worst parts of Oracle are probably quite far (organizationally speaking) from product development. The draconian pursuit of licensing at the cost of customer trust probably being the worst aspect.

Here’s testimony from Cameron Purdy, he used to work for Kurian at Oracle - https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-O...

Quite interesting, thanks!

"the results speak for themselves" :)

Some people speak quietly, and use words that do not convey exactly what they are feeling. TK is very good at speaking at an amply audible level and using very efficient words (often no more than 4 letters long)

People here are complaining about the enterprise, but I'm not really part of that segment (the complete IT dept of my company is about 10 employees) and I also feel ignored by Google in my small microcosm.

With the change of leadership I guess small dev teams like mine will become even more ignored as it seems GCP's will focus on the big whales instead of small fish with different needs.

Anyway, from my perspective, it really feels like GCP is living 5 years ago and has zero ambition or understanding of what's going on in the dev space. Also I have to say its marketing is generally doing a poor job at convincing people to use their services.

Some concrete examples to expand on the previous points:

I want a simple and convenient Heroku-like service (and hopefully a better price). For years I had no idea App Engine even existed and after checking it out a couple of times I still have no idea how it compares in terms of pricing.

I want GraphQL services like AWS AppSync, Prisma, or Hasura. Google has zero GraphQL services (AFAIK).

I want serverless solutions like AWS Lambda or like Zeit Now v2. AWS recently even announced Aurora serverless (a relational database unlike the usual NoSQL). The serverless offerings by Google are quite frankly mediocre. Our team is moving away from Firebase and Google's cloud functions offerings are really lagging behind Lambda.

Wondering why again SAP isn't even mentioned...

They literally should stop pilling up crap like kubernetes and look back at what 9P and Plan9 were and why. Especially that they have almost the whole Plan9 team employed.

Making analogues of J2EE Application Servers for native code is the wrong way. It is against intelligence.

It is the return of the mainframe and time-sharing, just with prettier interfaces.

Enterprise loves them.

As for Plan 9, the end of the road was Inferno and Limbo actually. Plan 9 was the stepping stone.

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