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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com