I can think of no worse way to entice technologists to flock to your cloud platform than to announce that you're "borrowing from the Oracle playbook"...
Google Cloud sucks at enterprise sales. By all objective measures, Oracle absolutely owns this part. It's not as black and white as they need to become Oracle in order to learn some things from them.
As someone who consults with a lot of enterprises and helps them with their cloud architecture, I can see first hand that the market share of Google Cloud there is about 0. It's only internal, toy projects and nothing critical, because they already have AWS and Azure and that's that.
Even with all their technological excellence, it doesn't matter. That strategy failed, and they're losing.
I'm willing to wait and see how a sales-centric strategy works out.
https://hackernoon.com/why-and-how-we-left-app-engine-after-...
Enterprise adoption != developer adoption.
That's why Google desperately needs a strong sales team.
Why would I recommend google to anyone when there is no stability in their platform?
What I was getting at, though, is that if you're a big user of GCloud IaaS products and some of their more basic infrastructual SaaS offerings (Cloud SQL, Bigtable, etc. etc.) you're unlikely to run into the kind of issue you mentioned, and everything from the pricing to the way customer relationships are handled reflects that.
Google Maps is basically an application as a service, which, while technically all part of "cloud", is not really part of the core cloud offering in the same way. On the Cloud Console, Google Maps is listed in the menu at the very bottom, as the only entry under "Other Google Solutions".
All the cloud providers have a mix of offerings that range from very standard (IaaS, or managed open source systems like Cloud SQL and AWS RDS) to very proprietary (things like BigQuery, DynamoDB.) If you decide to use one of the very proprietary ones, you have to recognize that you're creating a very different kind of dependency and risk - migrating to another provider or hosting onprem becomes a rewrite, instead of a migration.
That's a risk you should ideally be aware of before you choose such a solution, and it's not unique to Google. That same level of risk doesn't exist for the other kinds of products I've mentioned, so it doesn't make sense to treat that risk as though it applies to all Google products.
The business sets the budget and the requirements, but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people.
There's definitely a lag between technical people getting interested in something and that thing getting big in enterprise, but there's still a correlation. Just as there's a inverse when everyone in tech hates a thing and a few years later businesses stop adopting it (see Oracle's slow decline, particularly for new customers).
Have you ever worked at a large enterprise? That's almost never how it goes.
An executive has a meal with a sales person, who says their technology will solve all of the executive's problems, then the executive signs up for a paid trial, and then tells the people that report to them that they are going to implement the thing.
Some better enterprises will cut it off at that point after the technologists come back and say the trial didn't work out, but many enterprises will simply plow forward, either falling to the sunk cost fallacy, or because the executive's friend at another company told them it worked well at the other company.
Unfortunately for them they also burned way too many bridges with technologists as well.
I don't get the allure of AWS, but Azure definitely knows how to hook into Enterprise infrastructure. I don't know what GCP "doesn't have" for the Enterprise.
They lack absolutely everything that makes a successful enterprise company.
Customer service. All the way to the CEO/CTO level, where in event a named customer has a problem and fuming at something, the execs show up at customer's site in person to butter the relationship. Never underestimate how important it is to have a high up person with authority to reassign priorities at a vendor do the executive customer service in order to keep and grow enterprise side healthy.
As if Google is teetering on the brink? Or are you suggesting they'll just pull the plug on GCS? They very well might. Which, in fact, is probably half the reason companies won't buy what they're selling.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-mo...
It's hard enough finding Postgres SAs these days as it is!
That only seems to be true for places unwilling to pay reasonable amounts of money.
And by "reasonable" I'm not meaning Oracle Consultant $US3k+/day either. ;)
Generally I try and steer them to either the PostgreSQL jobs mailing list (https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-jobs/), or if they have specific needs then I'll steer them to appropriate people (if known).
Of the people that contact me... some are Weird (not in any positive way). When I ask them how much they're looking to pay (even roughly), they either avoid answering that point, go silent completely, or just do other strange stuff.
Those ones don't get put in contact with anyone. Not sure what they think they're doing, but wasting people's time isn't on.
Any startup choosing google cloud is taking an unnecessary risk.
This is something where Microsoft has done well because it’s always done this and wasn’t too late into cloud. It’s an area Oracle have done well pre-cloud and are late to cloud but hoping like hell to bank on their strong enterprise sales capabilities (doesn’t seem to be working for them though). And it seems to be an area that Amazon have done well due to early mover, being dominant, and with that focusing on building enterprise sales.
Google... I don’t know what they’re doing, they’ve never been an enterprise software company. So he may be into something.