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Comment by amenod | Hacker News Reader

Gmail is a market leader only because it is good enough (and at the start it was even better than competition) and because it was free - and still is for some cases. Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them.

Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get any support from them, even if you are paying (there are exceptions, yadda yadda...). With Oracle, their products may suck (and they do), but the company knows to answer the phone for their customers, otherwise they won't be able to sell that beefy contract in a few months' time.

> Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable?

Oracle? Lol.

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> Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them.

> They are firmly non-enterprise

So you acknowledge you don't really have knowledge of the core enterprise suite Google sells to enterprises, but at the same time you're certain they're non-enterprise?

Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps) is absolutely enterprise. They definitely have enterprise support contracts, and the few times I've had issues while having a support contract they have been easy to work with.

> Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps.

You hit the nail on the head why enterprises stay away from Google. They are going to lose focus on it as soon as no one internally can justify maintaining it to enhance their careers and show “scope” and “impact”.

They've been selling Google Workspace for 16 years. Its one of the biggest MDM platforms out there. ~~There are over 2 billion users of this paid enterprise suite.~~ Guess I was wrong on that figure, >2 billion users with >6 million paid subscriptions.

Those are non paid users

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...

> As of March 2020, there were 6 million paid customers, according to Google’s most recent publicly available stats.

Ah, I misread their announcements.

There's still supposedly over 2 billion users of these services. Its not a small project with a niche client set where absolutely nobody pays. Reader was popular, but not 2 billion users popular. How many people do you think really used Allo? Its really not in the same space as the many products they've killed.

It matters because Microsoft uses its much larger paying installed based to support a slew of first party and third party companies to provide “enterprise support”. They have hundreds of people in sales that report back to MS what large enterprises want.

People on HN don’t grok “the enterprise”.

I mentioned in another post, that even though I work for $BigTech, I work in the cloud enterprise consulting space (not Azure). Dealing with the enterprise is a completely different beast than dealing with other tech companies. Microsoft has almost four decades of experience in the space.

Even on the personal side, I would much rather deal with MS for my one lonely 5 person Office365 subscription than Google support.

I don’t have direct experience with administrating Oracle, but my impression is that they make a lot of money from the moats they’ve built: but they would never have been able to build them if the product was garbage to begin with. Sure, nobody would probably pick Oracle today for a new project almost regardless of size, but surely there must have been a point in time when Oracle was simply superior when it came to stability and functionality? If not, their current size really makes no sense, because you can’t build a business on scamming people in the long run.

> because you can’t build a business on scamming people in the long run.

When switching is effectively impossible, this is what happens.

Oracle has been buying various application companies with installed bases that are difficult to migrate away from. They are essentially buying customers to milk after putting in their enclosed pasture.

Switching isn't impossible, there are plenty of companies that help you get off Oracle. It's just that it's risky and time consuming, requires specialized knowledge, and companies would rather pay up than deal with all of those things. But this goes for almost any complex product on the planet. Switching costs are high,

5 - 10 years back, Oracle was very far ahead of the database game and there was no practical competitor regarding performance, query optimization, storage management and enterprisey management features. For quite some time, if you needed a large central relational store for a business, Oracle was the only answer.

The main change is that MariaDB and PostgreSQL have caught up a lot of ground over the last years, so OracleDB has been losing the edge they have been paid for.

Gmail in no shape form or fashion a “market leader” in the enterprise.

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