Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
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I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023.
> said people with knowledge of the matter.
As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw some meeting notes.
> The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market.
So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.
In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an executive level ever.
You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level.
And finally:
> A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this story, but after it appeared released the following statement: "Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate."
There may be some truth to these accounts--reality is often between the lines--but this is extremely soft on details and actual first person accounts.
The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use.
Google has lost a lot of trust in the community and if Google management wants to avoid this kind of reaction, they need to build a reputation for stability. Years of dropping products people rely has eroded much of the good will people used to have for Google.
Amazon doesn't drop products. Microsoft has spent decades building a reputation for having a long term reliable product road-map.
Google is fickle and doesn't seem to care when they screw people over by changing terms underneath us. As the old saying goes—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Been using AWS for 8+ years since their first inception of S3, then 6 years of GCP. This year I had first hand experience with Azure. I just happen to think GCP has the most cutting edge cloud native technologies and services (GKE is much better than EKS or AKS, IMO; BigQuery is awesome). But AWS has a first mover's advantage and MSFT has the dominant enterprise customer base so pushing additional add-on sales is much easier. Those are GCP are up against.
Perhaps the market is big enough to accommodate top 3 players to be profitable. And GCP needs to do a better job in support their product & services not discontinuing them abruptly.
And it wouldn't matter of there wasn't even an ounce of truth there, Google's reputation on future roadmap, communication, marketing and product dropping has always been on the negative.
Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era.
No, but it also doesn't say they're in for the long haul in case they don't end up on top and with Google's well documented and long history of killing products you really can't fault people for wondering if it is wise to build on top of GCP no matter what the advantages.
For potential users, why should we take the risk when there are other competitors that don't have this problem?
Risking losing funding if they don't surpass AWS or Azure is a scary thought. It's a shame because GCP is very good from what I've read.
Since it seems the majority of support and service at Google Cloud is made up of TVCs, with 2 year 'life spans', it seems Google is just hedging their bet, no need to bring people on permanently if you're going to downsize in 2-3 years. In fact, is it entirely coincidental that the goal is to be #1 in roughly the same timeframe as the TVCs are allowed to work? Seems like the same sort of lack of commitment to GCP that Google place in their workers.
Perception matters. When you see the lack of trust Google has vs Amazon and Microsoft, you know you have a problem — both companies have track records of less than trustworthy actions.
Infrastructure should be built on rock, not sand. Google has sold too much sand.
Businesses need to focus on their next battle not finding a replacement API, web toolkit or cloud.
Stop, do you mean that despite cutting the corners with technical support and having a weaker offering than the competition, GCP is not freakin' profitable?
No customer is going to sink risk into a statement like that. Everyone wants to know that the investment increases and only increases.
E.g. if stuff like AlphaGo, Youtube, or the Search Engine used tons of cloud computing resources you should not count it as no profit made (actually loss because of power consumption, server housing, networking, ...), regardless if those cloud resources were anyways unused. Then it's up to your colleagues then to make the profit.
This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stuff better and I think Microsoft has bet the whole company on azure).
Comparatively speaking they are incompetent both Technically and Manageability, compared to Amazon and Azure, or to better phase it compared to Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella.
It remains to be seen now Google CEO Sundar Pichai, now also Alphabet CEO will change. ( I could never understand how Google Cloud also had a CEO )
Nope. Engineers know this product is dead. There's no way they'll risk their time and money on something Google doesn't believe in. We've been bitten time and time again, and adopting GCP is about the riskiest move you can make: hitching your entire project to a dying technology platform.
Since no one will be willing to make this gamble, GCP's growth rate will flatline. Exactly the condition Google said would cause them to shutter it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Their platform just died today.
It's sad, because Spanner is actually really cool tech.
I bet Google engineers and PMs on GCP are reading this right now and already thinking about their future within the company.
In the future, we'll probably be able to look back at today as a major shift in strategy for Google.
Totally gonna believe them
Google is a trillion-dollar company and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads platform. It's not going anywhere.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
Google obviously has a firm grip on what they’re willing to call unacceptable losses for an investment, but they need to realise that there is reputation damage every time they axe one of these projects that they don’t seem to be accounting for at all in their decision-making.
I hope Google's C-suite is treating this article as the PR equivalent of a Sev-1 servers-on-fire emergency, because it is. If they don't come out swinging today and announcing that they're all-in on GCP for the long haul, it's toast. It may be toast even if they do.
Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.
What would one prefer ? Google top brass not setting deadline to beat competition? Google not trying to be market leader ?
You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS.
We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have a Slack channel we share with our dedicated GCP contacts, so we can easily ask questions. Two of my coworkers just got out of a meeting with Google PMs less than an hour ago. Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team(s).
Yes, you have to pay for support. They have a couple different support options, depending on your needs. But you have to pay for support with AWS too.
The one bad thing about Google Cloud support is their Level 1 support. It is very easy to submit a support ticket, and they will respond quickly. But if you are highly technical, and know what you are doing, and can research yourself, Level 1 support it nearly useless. They do make it easy to to escalate, with a prominent Escalate button in the ticket. And you can always escalate through your direct contacts (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineer). But it would be nice if Level 1 could be bypassed, or were more technical. I think they are trying to iterate on the process. They recently started offering to have a video call a lot of the time, which isn't my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying to improve the Level 1 support.
If you are using Google Cloud as part of a business, you will be able to contact them. You will probably have an account manager that you can probably meet in person with. If you pay for support you will be able to submit support tickets, real humans will respond, and respond quickly.
The trouble is that their customer service is terrible.
We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existed. The engineer even found more bugs while watching my screen.
The sales engineers (solution consultants?) are rather slimey, especially compared to the PMs who often admit when they don’t know something. This one eng kept pushing Dataflow even after we said no 100 times. It appears Google uses Dataflow / Beam internally now (instead of MapReduce) and so I guess at Google you’re dumb if you’re not doing the “correct” thing.
Also frustrating was how much money we wasted due to things like multi-gpu jobs taking 10-15 minutes to start and their GPU hypervisor pausing the whole system for 10-20 seconds incessantly.
If you use GCE, make sure Google is paying for the bloody edges. Get a ton of credits.
In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN.
I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.
GCP is the absolute worst at human support. Of course you get responses when you pay for support (since you're paying) but even then we've had several instances of refunded support costs because of a lack of reply over their SLA.
This implies that you live/work close to a Google office. Correct?
Now that we know they're not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023, what reason does anyone in their right might have to use their services?
I was previously considering GCP. And now I'm not.
Great job, Google. You're so short-sighted you'll remain in adtech forever. Not even your founders could keep interest.
This leak was a billion dollar mistake. And I'm grateful for it. It's saved me a whole lot of headache.
If you create a culture of intense internal competition, where identities are tied to subunits (e.g. a product team) over the company, you incentivise leaks. Google's elitist, "product founder" driven culture, unmonitored by a detached leadership, almost guaranteed this sort of sniping and in-fighting.
Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
I have no clue how anyone could arrive at that interpretation. What exactly let you to that conclusion?
They're at war with a subset of the staff over unionizing. And they have a "culture of openness" around internal information.
This is an attempt (which according to some of the comments here quite succeed) to create a story where there is no story.
Should Google Cloud aim to be better and bigger? Sure. Should Google / Alphabet execs need to discuss challenges and strategy? Sure.
What and where is the story?
GCP produce new products and features every week [1]
At my company, we use all major 3 clouds. The GCP support is super fast. The GCP price is better than other two.
Google indeed has a learning curve as a company, and that is at the area of selling to the enterprise. By its DNA, Google is an engineering company, and it takes years to understand how to "attack" the market, build teams of sales, marketing, and all the supporting infrastructure, and they do it.
Time will tell how successful they are, but I cannot see any option for them to shut down this great platform known as GCP. It simply make no sense.
There is a trend in the media in the recent months to rant about Google by all means and angles, and I tend to think this article is just one of those.
A rising tide lifts all boats. Are more companies adopting GCP because they are leaving Amazon/Azure? Or is it simply because the market is still immature and growing fast?
> The group [which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
It's sounds like shutting down GCP at some point is definitely a possibility.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy.
When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.
On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering.
Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.
And that's when I talk about Google Enterprise Search.
ORACLE'S. CLOUD. STRATEGY.
Let's hire Thomas Kurian, bang up job on Fusion and ... oh wait, what do you mean with 'total failure'?
Oracle bought Sun, it had the keys to be the third force against AWS and MSFT - and they totally blew it. Just an amazing fumble, worse than MSFT and smartphones.
Because if so, he did a pretty good job of achieving his objective: establishing market dominance in the face of superior competing products.
Hiring Kurian is a message to investors that Google is serious[1] about trying to take over the cloud platform space, through any means necessary.
[1] At this moment, at least. Given Google's history, their actual commitment to their cloud platform remains to be seen.
On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of the three.
What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead.
I think if Google were to get serious about communicating focus and dedication to their cloud business (the opposite of what they’re doing now), they could conceivably catch up to Microsoft.
Sounds like an arbitrage opportunity. Have tons of unused Azure credits that were forced on you? We'll happily use them up and pay you back a fraction of that credit.
Azure is the one to beat, IMO.
My projection is that -- if everything continues along the same trend line we've seen through 2019 -- in five years MS will comfortably be on top and Google Cloud will have rough parity with AWS, but be significantly far behind MSFT.
Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud but this opinion is my own.
Can you describe what you are referring to here?
I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.
Also, Microsoft naturally is the to-go place if you want a partner to trust as an enterprise. They have proven to support systems and software in the long run.
Also, Pentagon just picked Azure over AWS - so Azure has a good run and bright future I'd say.
So, if any Google Cloud employees are reading this, please report back that this just killed any interest I had in Anthos, Google Cloud Run, the managed Google "Kubernetes Apps", etc. Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes.
> Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes.
I think this is perfectly healthy and a stance you should take everywhere.
Actually I started using Office365 instead of Google Docs recently and have been quite happy with the results. Especially OneNote’s live sync.
Every time there's a GCP story on HN commenters say "I won't use it because Google can just pull the plug." I thought this opinion was silly as GCP is the #3 cloud provider in the world, not a free service like Reader.
Guess I was wrong, nothing is safe. Google wants #1 or nothing at all.
And then they pulled the plug on my accounts because some of my android apps had "likeness or similarity to other apps" which I have absolutely no idea what it meant. Then they pulled the plugs on my colleague's account because of equally vague reason.
It was time for me to give up GCP forever.
So now that everyone knows they are waffling on whether to stay in the business (and have a deadline), Microsoft and Amazon just need to increase the competitive intensity for the next few years to drive Google out and instead of cloud computing being an oligopoly it'll be a duopoly.
If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible, because the long-term future of this market is AWS and Azure being an extremely high margin duopoly with massive barriers to entry. You might see aggressive competition before 2023, but 10 years out it's not going to be that.
The NYT wrote a piece a few days ago about certain startups considering antitrust complaints against AWS, and more of them should consider that [1]. The FTC is investigating AWS [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-ft...
The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.
If Jeff Bezos sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023" would you assume that they'd shutter the whole thing if they didn't meet that goal? Of course not.
Why is a goal and strategy for Google treated differently?
You can't predict the future.
Just build your workloads to be cloud agnostic. If prices ever change, then you can move your workload wherever it makes sense at that time.
Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS.
The only "duopoly" will be in terms of the hyper-scale size of such providers, but very, very, very few customers actually need such hyper-scale. Not to mention, you literally get to pick and choose how much of their tech you use, limiting any potential risk of lock-in. Not to mention, the hyper-scale providers are probably the most expensive ones!
I think this is all very over-blown. AWS's services are fantastic for scaling up services quickly, and their customer focus is great, but if they were all gone tomorrow we'd still be doing the same things as before, just slower and with less reliable infrastructure.
Somewhere down the line, they came back to me to let me know that I had not given them clear instructions and what I had asked was impossible. In the meanwhile, an intern in my team had got the entire solution up-and-running on a small, self-hosted containerized service. I showed them and they mumble about something to be fixed and how they'll get back to me. All in all, a complete waste of time, resources and bandwidth. I am glad it was for just six weeks and in hindsight, I'm happy I didn't get the rest of my team involved in it.
We have worked with Azure since then and I am super impressed with their professionalism. There are hiccups but the understanding I now hold is this - Google (probably still) builds great consumer products but have zero clue on how to work with enterprises while it appears to be the opposite with Microsoft. Their razor-sharp and sole focus on enterprise appears to help them excel instead of having a diffused, unclear strategy that is Google's currently.
And there can be a flavor of condesending attitude when they assume the customer doesn't know anything.
Why would you ever consider GCP over AWS/Azure knowing that the Google scythe could kill it at any time, with your suspicions confirmed by a leak this? Bonkers.
Reader could've been a successful company on its own for sure, for example. I wasn't a user of it, but there was enough people who loved it enough.
I don't really believe that they will leave the cloud wars, but still goes to show you the scale and profitability of their ad business and how central it is that even after billions of invested they can still decide to shutter something.
Doesn't exactly instill confidence in your customers to trust you for the service you provide.
But I think the morality is to never put all your eggs in the same basket, because any of them can fail for external reasons — e.g. horror stories about people locked out of any service because payments failed due to some stupid action by their bank; months to fix issues... don't be that guy/business with a single point of failure.
So, contingency plans, and a healthy distribution of your flows.
Have several banks/cards, several clouds, front load balance with a cross-platform HA solution, then for everything behind peg providers against each other; optimize for cost or convenience or whatever.
This is the resilient way; and possibly even antifragile as you develop new synergies in this meta-space. It also sends a message that interop is value to you, to the market.
When you operate at that level, there may be room for GC in your system — typically where you can afford it to fail / disappear but it's better/cheaper as long as it lives. You're already ready for the day it dies, because you make that risk assessment a parameter in your arch.
All of your vendors are just as responsive.
People are quick to grab their pitchforks.
Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure.
Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas.
I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near Apple's excellent support. But again, zero to do with Cloud.
It's literally as silly as saying you won't use AWS because Amazon won't give you a refund on a shirt you ordered.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And yet here we are. Glad I kept clutching those pearls.
#2 by 2023? Good luck. I wouldn't bet a dollar on them knocking Amazon or Microsoft off their perches by then, and I won't spend another dollar on GCP.
We did have one application running on their cloud, but decided to move it to aws because we just can't trust them to keep anything around. Every year we had to rebuild some part of our app, because they replaced or completely removed some feature we were using. It got old and we were done with it...
There is something seriously broken at google. This puts Larry quitting in more context. He’s lost confidence in google doing this, then there is nothing left for the org to do. Over—compensated, over-entitled, over-talented engineers that, when put together can’t actually accomplish anything.
Maybe gutting the product org all those years ago was a mistake.
That being said, their advertising business is insanely successful. I suspect they could at least double their stock price (and thus the wealth of their investors) if they dumped their speculative bets and focus on ads. It is extremely profitable and revenue keeps growing > 20% from a large base.
Meanwhile, aws’s long history of walking people up the ramp of IAAS makes it more of a fit when they do start adding PAAS service and they fill a real need and get great adoption(for some/a lot of them)
What exactly is wrong with being on the list of potential cloud providers for almost every project? Have you ever been on a non-MS project where someone didn't at least mention GCP instead of AWS?
Google being as profitable as it is can afford options. Why not sit around in number 3 spot?
For example, in 2014, James Hamilton spoke about how every day that year, AWS was adding enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon's global infrastructure when it was a $7B annual revenue enterprise (2004). That scale of build-out, server purchasing, etc. presumably justifies and enables significant cost reductions, such as buying equipment from vendors in bulk with steep discounts, or buying or building large facilities at once, etc. AWS is custom designing many parts of its stack including networking chips and software, ARM-based CPUs, and more; that kind of investment is only worthwhile at a certain large scale. This scale presumably motivated AWS's purchase of chipmaker Annapurna Labs in 2015. Some operator of a few colocation facilities, by comparison, could not justify designing custom silicon since their scale would not allow them to recoup the R&D costs. Before AWS reached whatever scale made these kinds of investments worthwhile, they were purchasing commodity hardware.
To pick another example, a company like SpaceX can only be profitable if it launches a certain minimum number of rockets per year. Without enough rocket launches, and demand from customers, you can't recoup the R&D budget needed to design them.
Google has a head start in cloud because their company's existing facilities are already huge. However, public infrastructure has different demands than internal infrastructure, and it sounds like the necessary investments in public have been costly.
No CTO who valued their career would go with GCP. “No one ever got fired for choosing AWS/Microsoft”. Even if Azure isn’t held in as high esteem as AWS, businesses trust Microsoft.
for those interested in management fads, https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-succes...
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
Its crazy that they would even consider closing google cloud after gaining so much traction. Especially with BigQuery, Dataflow, Firebase, Kubernetes engine and Cloud Run being at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going. Dialogflow is also hitting at the right time where smart home products and home automation are becoming mainstream.
How do they expect to do in 7 years (launch of compute engine) what Amazon did in 13? Its crazy that they would be so unreasonable.
"Alibaba Cloud earns 90% of its revenue in China and has not appreciably grown its enterprise customer base outside of China. Alibaba has limited capabilities in terms of an MSP ecosystem, third-party enterprise software integration and operational tools; and small global field teams limit adoption outside of China."
"Google demonstrates an immaturity of process and procedures when dealing with enterprise accounts, which can make the company difficult to transact with at times. This can be attributed to its nascent focus on the enterprise market. The immaturity of process is most pronounced in areas such as contract negotiation, discounting, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing, integration with enterprise systems and support."
Google already has a leg up on this, their cloud offerings and APIs make a lot more sense than AWS.
For example, I've heard engineers complain about bad instances and intermittent networking issues. Concerns that I have never heard about in AWS except in the very early days of it.
I haven't looked at GCP in a long time, but I remember everything being very python-centric and very lightly documented.
Winning in technology often comes down to having a serious customer-centric product management function.
All of the anecdotes in this article are from early to mid 2018.
So why is someone leaking these stores 18 months later?
Detailed multi-year strategic planning as a change from 18-month plans seems more consistent with a recognition that significant progress on the obvious indicators is a long slog and that positioning for it is going to take tracking less direct indicators over a longer period than it is with increased pressure for short-term results. Increased pressure for immediate results tends to be accompanied by reduced long-term planning.
You're cattle to Google. Their lack of customer support in literally every one of their offerings shows their approach to making money. They will shut you off in a heartbeat and you have no recourse except to email a bot. Ultimately your puny little shop doesn't matter to their bottom line.
I assume the thinking is that if the ROI is not high enough, then you might as well just invest that money into the more profitable portions of your business.
If I was a paranoid person, I might think this article is a sinister plan from Amazon or Microsoft. A quote like this can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: managers are already wary about GCP because of Google's flaky reputation, hearing a quote like this could easily make it worse, and the lack of new business makes Google all the more likely to shut it down.
Google has assigned so many engineers to building and running the platform. That means the platform has a high ongoing cost to provide. Unless the platform grows rapidly and grabs a significant chunk of the market, it will never be profitable at Googles current level of investment.
You can't scale a project down from 5000 engineers to just 50 and expect it to carry on running as before.
The tech is there - but alignment isnt. I dont know if Google is capable of anything outside of search.
Even if the share has to be divided forever between 3 major cloud providers, it would eventually pay off.
That was Microsoft’s Bing versus Google strategy.
Money can’t necessarily buy market dominance, even vast quantities of money.
They also have no way to fix the customer service issues plaguing every product of theirs, including their cloud stuff. So, so many stories about how bad they are.
Building atop Google is betting the farm on a fickle master.
Reese Bobby : Huh? What are you talking about, Son?
Ricky Bobby : That day at school.
Reese Bobby : Oh hell, Son, I was high that day. That doesn't make any sense at all, you can be second, third, fourth... hell you can even be fifth.
Ricky Bobby : What? I've lived my whole life by that!
GCP is easy to use when compared to AWS according to me. I have used both the service providers. Starting with Firebase, Firebase hosting, App Engine, Compute Engine, GKE, BigQuery and monitoring via stackdriver. Everything just fits very well.
Number of people visiting their yearly Sessions are increasing and their training platforms(Qwiklabs & YouTube videos) are very much precise. Most of the issues are solved in Stackoverflow itself and you have Google groups for each products.
This is the ultimate suicide you need to take to destroy public trust, once and for all.
A big nugget from behind the paywall: "This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said."
The article also claims Google Cloud isn't profitable under their current business plan: "The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market."
Google offers the Google name and a reputation for ditching services when the wind shifts. They really have little or no competitive advantage here. I'd personally rather build atop Linode or Digital Ocean than Google or at most, stick to the middle of the road, most generic parts of Google's platform.
Too absurd for reality.
Or is it more the fact they considered it at all?
Of course, this article does say "The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies" with emphasis on "big", but maybe there will be some trickle down for the small fry amongst it all.
Therefore, this story is almost equivalent to saying 'Google will ignore cloud from 2023 onward'. Were I ever to consider GCP, this alone would cause me to run far far away.
If Google is serious at all about cloud, it would issue a quick denial. If it does not, well, it would be evidence in favour of the story's credibility.
This is purposefully misleading.
From the Q3 2019 10-Q: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001...
Ad revenue: 33.9B Other revenue: 6.4B
"Google other revenues consist primarily of revenues from: Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store; Google Cloud offerings; Hardware; and YouTube subscriptions."
"Other revenues" is up nearly 40% q/q compared to Q3 2018:
"Our Google other revenues increased $1,788 million and $4,639 million from the three and nine months ended September 30, 2018 to the three and nine months ended September 30, 2019, respectively. The growth was primarily driven by revenues from Google Cloud offerings as well as revenues from Google Play, largely relating to in-app purchases (revenues which we recognize net of payout to developers)."
I begin to wonder if cloud has a parallel here: Does Google actually need, for selfish reasons, to inform significant cloud tenants in GCP that continuity of their business is core, and will be factored into any business development, or retiral, or sale options?
Elastic Search comes to mind: If you build to a dependency on Elastic, in GCP, its comforting to know it works in AWS but they are not an entirely identical product. From a business continuity model, mostly the same. Different tokens, different backend underneat the ES componentry. Does it matter? Depends how critical Clous ES is to your business.
I can understand their ambitious plans, and naturally you decrease funding for a project if it keeps hemorrhaging money. It says the Google C-suite discussed the idea of leaving the market, as any rational person would do, but dismissed it. I think the way article describes these things is putting a whole of color on this.
But so what, Google thinks it can beat AWS and Azure? Well, it's good they have big goals. Such a heavy bet on their cloud business seems quite sensible, and while they mention cutting spending if they don't achieve those goals, I don't see it as a big of problem as people seem to think. I mean other cloud providers don't even have that amount of money to put into their cloud businesses' and no one is lamenting about that.
To me this whole debate should be about how impractical and out of touch with customers Google has become since.. I can't even recall. Maybe it's the algorithm-based engineer interviews but something's wrong with Google's internal workings. Google Analytics' dashboard is still terrible, I don't like even how Google Docs work, Youtube is I guess ok but they blundered the live-streaming et cetera. I've never used GCP but it always seemed a bit too over-designed and flashy and, well, not practical. On the other hand AWS's console, even though it is at times unintuitive it feels for some reason quite nice and practical. It's weird and subjective, I know.
Could it be that when I had my first touch with AWS I had been given a quite positive view of the whole service vs. I have quite negative prior feelings about other Google services that cloud my judgement. Who knows.
Yet still, perhaps Googlers at their fancy Mountain View office have become a bit too detached from the regular Joes working for their gray corporate masters who want nothing to do with their hipster dashboards and just want something simple that works. Maybe pride comes before a fall, like with Microsoft. Luckily for MSFT Nadella started to change their culture.
This strategy is working so well for them, I just don’t see why they would even care about grinding out a little extra market share in the cloud hosting space. Why? Maybe just to boost their ego?
Is it really worth it to them? Whatever comparatively small amount of extra revenue they squeeze out will still be dwarfed by the ad revenue. I imagine they will continue doing what they do.
In a world where the public cloud is dominated by a handful of providers its likely (if not already the case) that AWS will become by far the biggest buyer (with the best economics) of compute and storage.
Obviously there are many other barriers to competing with google, but if amazon could provision the amount of storage and compute needed for YouTube and search in the headroom of its public cloud (and even worse if AWS customers could do this for a cheaper cost than google itself) this would be a negative thing for google.
E.g. Hetzner offers an 8-core 128GB Xeon SkyLake machine with unlimited 1gbps traffic for around $120/month while Google offers n1-highmem-8 with 8 cores and 52GB and no traffic for $240/month.
1gbps unlimited traffic on Hetzner means 324 TB/month, which would cost 26000$ on GCP at the lowest 0.08$/GB rate.
So I would consider cutting the instance prices by half, and dividing the bandwidth prices by 1000, and then they will be competitive.
(If I had negative experiences, believe me, I'd be the first to point them out. Just a happy user.)
There are a few annoying aspects of GCP, but the complexity seems roughly equal to AWS. Both have their pain points.
The $300 free credit is immensely helpful. I hope Google keeps it.
Currently I see
GCP TPU options beat the pants off of everyone. I love bigquery.
Azure has by far the best storage options. The bucket storage is much cheaper. The azure file storage is best of class. I don't like it's bigquery/athena alternatives
AWS is the incumbent, I love the spot market, but more and more we have just been running low end workloads there. Athena is the best of class of analytics tools if your data is already in a bucket.
We are firing up our IBM cloud presence now.
I'm curious as to how this will change with the acquisition of Red Hat. It's still too recent to see any kind of impact yet.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202... ?pu=hackernewsyw3xln&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock
How did it end up with utm_source=hackernews in the url? Dang is this something you change or is it user submitted?
What isn’t google going to close?
Would it be reasonable to now run a headline “Google to close cloud in 2023 following failure to dominate”
Google just can't compete with hustlers like Amazon, Alibaba and to some extent Microsoft (ex-Oracle leader not withstanding). Cloud business is commodity operational business.
It would be the ultimate differentiator. The only potential competitor would be Facebook, who doesn’t offer cloud services.
i won't say cloud isn't nice, i've been able to learn a lot by playing around with cloud servers. just good to remember that cloud isn't the only option for a lot of workloads.
Besides the notion of Google not investing in cloud seems rather ludicrous to me. They might as well formally announce that they're not competing in tech going forward & just count adtech dollars instead.
No one trusts your products to stick around or has the confidence that you won't shut down their accounts overnight due to an automation thinking something is wrong.
I think it's prudent to give them some time for internal dust to settle before buying into "conquer the world" deadlines.
1) Do serverless through standards and avoid vendor lock-in
There's a huge opportunity for a cloud vendor who has a credible zero lock-in offering.
Does that imply that Microsoft is first and Amazon is second? That is surprising to me.
Isn’t this backwards? I thought aws was quite a bit bigger than azure.
GOOGLE: we want to to be in the top 2 or we will throw our toys and leave / defund.
EVERYONE ELSE BITTEN BY GOOGLE DISCONTINUING STUFF: errrr, why would I EVER choose you guys to host my stuff NOW unless you are ridiculously cheap and it would be super simple to switch to azure/aws.
heck if I was using them now, and saw this, I'd be making plans/contingencies to shift off them.
It sounds like a leadership problem, because only leadership can change the culture like that.
> I still lay claim that google is not hiring the talent that they think they are or claim to be.
Obviously I am biased. I don't think I'm particularly great or anything, but I find my colleagues to be by far the most capable I've ever worked with, and I did previously work at AWS, where engineers were also very smart.
> With such huge budgets and failed product after failed product one has to wonder what is the genesis of their failings.
Personally I think it's an issue with management structure rather than individuals. Frankly I don't think smart people matter all that much.. for the most part you only need sufficiently smart people to do their job, and good culture/management will make the team shine. I'd argue that engineers are individually significantly less important than product managers and managers.
That being said, I think the issue is that Google is just too engineering focused. This makes it a wonderful place to work, but I don't think it leads to great products most of the time. It's fine for products like search and ads, where you can literally measure if you are making improvements, but not so good for most products.
Engineers are more or less allowed to pick what they want to work on. Again, I enjoy this flexibility, but I think it also leads to a lack of focus, especially when product managers probably have a much better understanding of what customers want or need.
Of course, Google is a massive company so I don't know how reflective my own experience is of the larger picture! This is just my personal feeling.
To me, this seems less like they're selecting for good engineers and more like they're just selecting for people who really want Google on their resume.
"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired."
Or, to be perfectly honest, I do know: it's to drive outrage and clicks.
Google is not going shutter any business which brings in more than $1B in profit per year. It never has, and it never will.
Disclosure: ex-Googler, GCP user, hold no position in company stock.
A service that only exists in China to serve the Chinese audience may be bigger than worldwide services that serve worldwide audiences, but it's kind of irrelevant if you're not a Chinese company doing business exclusively in China.
For my personal projects, GCP is definitely my preference although I also like AWS and enjoyed using Azure while I had a Microsoft BizSpark grant. GCP is very easy to use.
For huge customers GCP provides good support, but I think that the GCP team really have to work harder to support small companies (I base this on HN comments, no personal experience).
Edit: noticed you work on Google. So that about explains it.