The reason for IBM's failure is pretty obvious. Their old school bare-metal servers at Softlayer are a good value, but the need for bare metal is decreasing with IO improvements like SR-IOV and real hardware level virtualization (ex HVM on AWS). I've also heard IBM is running that division into the ground.
Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure out how much my server would cost. They're too used to old school contracts when I can easily setup a server with many providers in 5 min with $5 for a month. IBM has never been a commodity business, but nearly everything they sell is becoming a commodity.
GCP's problem, as far as I can tell, is too much "cute" shitty documentation. And their hatred for maintaining services on a reasonable timescale. Everyone I know, even outside of tech, has lost a Google service they loved over the years to neglect. See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf?
It seems to be common knowledge that Google's infrastructure is technically the most solid of any cloud provider. That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses
I've built applications on AWS, IBM Cloud (Bluemix at the time), Azure, and GCP. If a client has no preference over platform, I usually go with GCP. I find it the simplest, cheapest, and most reliable for the type of stack we use.
I've never had a client question GCP on the basis of Google's pattern of removing services. I think people can logically separate Google's consumer-facing offerings from their paid cloud services, the same way people logically separate AWS from the Amazon store. I've never noticed a GCP service removed in the nearly 10 years I've used them. In fact, the pattern I see with GCP is that they're slower to add services , but the ones they do release are very well thought out and solid. AWS, on the other hand, seems to add tons of services, some of which are incomplete or never get traction.
I would happily use either AWS or GCP. IBM Cloud and Azure I'm far less inclined to use, although I can understand Microsoft shops wanting to use Azure. IBM Cloud is pointless.
Completely anecdotally speaking - at a few enterprises, convincing customers to make use of GCP has been an uphill battle. I notice deep misgivings regarding the support timescales, and even for supported products, poor support in general (ymmv+++).
GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support.
> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses
Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and after some experience this resonates quite well.
"cute shitty documentation" - reading the GCP docs has been nothing but a pleasure for me. I genuinely hate most documentation (I am looking at you Microsoft), but GCP is up there in quality, almost standing next to MDN.
Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious.
As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps and debugging them is a pain. Sometimes the function doesn't load at all when you change one thing, etc.
AWS was a bit of a better experience, and I think almost everyone knows what "S3" is. That is to say that AWS immediately springs to mind when you need to store BLOBs.
I have also read about people having a lot of problems with GCPs BigQuery - infrequent, but random downtimes with support not being able to figure out the issue.
Edit: As someone else said below - I do agree that all Google's services have a clear use, whereas AWS and Azure tend to have a lot that you just kind of ignore.
Let us not forget the Google Maps price bump still fresh in everyone’s mind. That was a kind way of reminding customers that Google isn’t serious about cloud.
Amazon costs go down routinely. Google costs go up or the services go away.
Your Golang mention reads as a total non-sequitur. I'm not even sure what it means. I think you are mad that they didn't provide a way to pin dependencies built-in to the language from the get-go? But few if any languages provide that. In every case I can think of, package management is done by an external tool. The only exception is... oh right, Golang now builds it in, including the ability to pin old versions. Sure it took a while, but what does that have to do with anything else you say here?
If anything Golang is a counter-argument to your thesis about why GCP isn't taking off. You're right that Google has done abysmally with its commitment to keeping services running for the long haul. But Go itself has been remarkably stable and compatible over the years since its introduction. Far moreso than Python, Rust, or JS in the same time period.
We're building new services on GCP and we like it, but even still for each element we develop a formal plan for moving it somewhere else because everyone here feels like severe and arbitrary changes or even termination is always a lurking possibility.
How are SoftLayer bare metal servers good value? Seriously, have you even checked how old the hardware is and what they charge for it? It's a complete ripoff.
IBM/Softlayer value differential for dedicated servers disappeared years ago. Cloud VMs are now faster, cheaper, and more reliable (because of abstracted components and live migration), and they all have dedicated nodes if you need isolation.
IBM Cloud is a slowly sinking ship with the only brightspot being Watson, but nobody seems to be able to describe that clearly so there's that.
> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade.
I’ve been thinking about building a 10yr hosting plan for my own want. I thought designing static and then hosting on RasPi behind CDN would be great, just stock enough spares and keep Internet service live... 3G or better sufficient.
Google has two big problems - developer relations and compliances.
Here's a very simple example - has anyone filed a ticket in Google cloud ? Well you cant, unless you are on an expensive tier of support. Even when you have one, it is super hard to file a ticket. They generally ask you to go to Google groups.
AWS and Azure ticket support is beyond awesome. Anything from issues with servers to billing. AWS has live chat support for 29$ per month. In India, the only way to get postpaid billing is through a local Google partner : Google will not do it. On AWS and Azure, it's a simple process after you hit a certain spend .
AWS Artifact is a brilliant self service tool for compliance. And I can't stress this enough - they do this country by country. They will issue digitally signed (for you) compliance documents for free. In fact, in India they went above and beyond and did specific compliance (using a big-4 consultancy) because of some regulatory changes that I highlighted.
I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service. Their entire sales org is broken.
As pointed out later in this thread you can now buy a support plan that allows you to file tickets directly from Google [1].
Unfortunately it starts at $100 per user per month and that tier won't get you a number to call, just a ticketing system, and in my experience response times are in a minimum of hours. For actual production systems you're going to want the $250 per user per month option that gives you a number to call.
> I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service.
I couldn't agree more with you about this. A lot of people love to knock Azure and AWS but their support, in my experience, is in a completely different league to GCP.
AWS also won't hesitate to help on bare "free tier" accounts if the issue is billing related, which is awesome. I accidentally ran up $400 by setting up the managed private Certificate Authority and forgetting about it, and AWS billing was quick to give me a $400 credit since the private CA went virtually unused.
Agreed. Slack is also awesome in this respect. You file a ticket and a human answers it quickly and it doesn’t matter if you are the IT department asking the question or just a regular user in the enterprise. They even offer live chat. I have no idea how to file a bug / feature suggestion with google. Big missed opportunity.
> Neither company is satisfied with that, of course. Google so much so that it moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums.
> (...)
> Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.
I'm not an Enterprise IT expert, but looking from the outside, it doesn't seem like AWS and Azure got to where they are today by following that playbook...
My personal take on it is that AWS was first-to-market with a 21st Century-ready cloud offering (i.e. you could pretty much hear developers shouting "Yes, THIS is what I'm talking about. Finally!") and Azure got to where it is by responding quickly and aggressively, with an additional pull for certain customers due to the synergy with MS / Windows, as well as being the next best choice for those directly competing with or not willing to sign up to Amazon.
If that's true, then unless Google / IBM can really differentiate themselves, they will always lag far behind. I don't know what other plans they have in store, but opening up Watson to other platforms or hiring an Oracle sales guy are not quite what I'd call differentiators.
Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. Initial attempts weren't great (Azure tables, branding changes) but they iterated fast and knocked it out the park.
Google is replicating Amazon now (after failing with app engine), but without the mindshare. Amazing because they are the cloud story - many cheap computers rather than huge ones. App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook.
AWS employs enormous number of "sales engineer". They are so aggressive that there is a joke that anyone with some name recognition in Korean dev community is going to AWS. I think Google trying Oracle approach is the right one. Their product is not bad, their sales is.
Modern cloud devrel seems very similar to big pharmas marketing to doctors.
Google needs sales-people on the ground, plain and simple. I live in a reasonably big European market when it comes to IT services and the Google cloud people are absent, and for that reason everybody goes either with Azure (because MS has got the most people trying to make the sale) or AWS (because it's still seen as technically ahead of the field).
Now, as an aside, rumor has it that even MS's Azure numbers are a little inflated, a big part of their cloud sales is just Office 365, but I think MS does some marketing and accounting gimmicks on the side by "attaching" Azure to these Office 365 sales.
I think aws also did a great job keeping competition "under fire". They release so many new services, so quickly (and in amazingly alphaish-at-best quality), that they are always perceived to offer the most complete cloud infrastructure.
Even being a differentiator doesn't seem to help. Joyent's Triton infrastructure is extremely impressive and container-centric, yet hasn't made a major dent into AWS.
I am not surprised for IBM but Google could do a heck of a better job if they treated their customers a bit better. They suddenly make changes to their policies and don't care a bit while discontinuing services who don't update their products. I had two very bad experience with Google. The first was when Firebase was still a niche and we built our product on top of it. Then they made an update where certain features were deprecated in the tier that we were in. One fine day the product stopped working.
The second was a more recent one where our app was discontinued from their playstore because they updated their SMS policies. All their communication were landing to my Bulk folder. Even HN has some horror stories about their 'couldn't care less' attitude.
Early Firebase PM here: which feature was this? I don't remember us making decisions where things abruptly stopped working, but please let me know what happened and I'll take a look.
I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that familiar with cloud tools that are significantly easier to use than AWS.
It's a boon for startups that are being quick and scrappy and haven't brought on a cloud specialist but need to use the cloud to run things regularly.
But where are the 1 year's worth of free credits ads? Or the regular meetups to hand out cloud credits and give a tech talk and promote some startup? I'm not even talking about basic customer service and support, something Google is notoriously skimpy on (although probably mandatory to build developer relations). This stuff is key. If they captured a unicorn or so, and churned out the occasional semi-corn technical founder who advocates for a gcloud stack out of SV when they move to their next gig, they will have grow their market so much better.
It's mindboggling to me that with their resources and being based in MTV, and being the single largest corporate alma mater of SV technical founders, more startups here aren't being marketed to use gcloud.
The total addressable market here is every non-local computational need.
That's trillions of dollars. For a market that is emerging right now, which already shows massive path dependency. So there's one time to win a slice. It can't be done later.
If I was Google's position, I wouldn't be running a profit. I'd be throwing every spare copper into Cloud to grab market share. I'd be giving away credits on street corners. Driving out at least IBM and Oracle by just drowning the market with data centre capacity. Buying my way into existing relationships. Finding folks in consumer-facing divisions who've trashed the brand ("how long until this service is canceled, ha ha ha") and pulling them up sharply. Doing whatever can be done.
I don't think Google really gets, at the highest levels, that this is the first business they have that can truly diversify them out of advertising. They seem to see it as a nice extra source of cash, rather than an existential imperative.
But then, Google hasn't got the DNA to be afraid of existential threats. It's just not something they've dealt with since they switched on the cash pumps. Meanwhile, everyone else in this fight gets it.
What this articles doesn't mention that much is that IBM and Google are both betting on catching the wave of containerization by following a somewhat similar strategy.
They're both focusing on a container-native, Kubernetes oriented and opinionated cloud. They're both heavily investing in Kubernetes development, AI integrated technologies and the results are visible in the quality of their container offering. Despite their reputation for obtuseness and lack of support, as an enterprise customer, we've had fantastic support, quick turnaround on issues and the actions taken on many of our feature requests.
As a developer, I've found GCP to be somewhat behind in features BUT man their documentation is good, and easy to use. Despite this article, I would bet big on Google Cloud. They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people. Maybe its due to Google Research? But I don't see them going anywhere soon and in fact, I do see them as the next iteration of AI-heavy, big data optimized and container native cloud (sorry, couldn't resist using all of the buzzwords).
Google has always seemed actively hostile when it comes to support, since they don't like to leave any power in the hands of a human when an algorithm could do it more efficiently. Is cloud any different?
Who even would use Google Cloud seriously? They have a shitty history of maintaining products after depreciation.
No, 1 year is not enough.
Once I've invested in your platform, minimum of 5-7 years guarantee is mandatory.
Too many horror stories to even think about moving there.
This is coming from an org which spends 10M/Yr on Azure/AWS.
Cloud is where Google's reputation for killing products is really going to haunt it. Every time HN commenters complain about Google axing a service, there are lots of "you're making too big a deal about this, no one is leaving Google because they ditched Reader" responses, and for its consumer products that may be true.
But decisions about which cloud provider to use are made by C-suite executives, and they absolutely do look warily at Google, especially in comparison with Amazon (which makes basically all its profit from AWS) and Microsoft (which is obsessed with back-compat and keeping old products working as long as possible). Basic risk management and the huge cost of abruptly switching clouds will be the albatross around GCE's neck.
Google is betting on serverless, with products that are very developer friendly.
Firebase and the Firestore NoSQL database just out of beta are awesome products, and they are backed by Google Cloud. The ability to build a serverless application out with nearly no server code, with authentication, file upload and hosting built-in is awesome.
Plus we can have Node processes for any server code that we might absolutely need, like for signing Stripe payments.
Two new services introduced and one in GA, plus multiple solid innovations like the Elastic Inference Predictors API. And this doesn't include roll-outs of existing services in new regions.
The amount of movement to Azure is staggering from AWS (if only from job postings and recruiters I speak to).
There are a lot of businesses that do not want to fund their competitor (rightfully so), even if Azure is half baked (it is, but one desperately hopes it gets better if one is forced to use it).
Also, Office 365, Exchange, AD, Sharepoint/OneDrive, Flow, and other platform lock-ins are not to be discounted.
A friend of mine at an old company who relied heavily on IBM (and paid for it) told me the story about how they were going to "get into the cloud stuff". They talked to their IBM consultant guy at a meeting about what they wanted to do and he told them what they were thinking of doing and he responded "well that will take a few weeks, they have to set it up".
Now it was possible their IBM contact was thinking of some sort of older managed hosting but he said they were talking about "cloud" for the entire meeting ... at that point it seemed IBM just thought of managed hosting as "cloud".
There doesn't seem to be much information in the article. No actual numbers just:
> the market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get a much bigger piece of the pie
In my circles people only talk about AWS and Google Cloud. I know there is going to be a massive segment of the market that just defaults into Azure because Microsoft .... but it seems to me that beyond that the race is pretty much over. IBM, Oracle all the others are not going to succeed beyond niche applications.
One thing Google doesn't get is how big a deal it was to reject the DoD. Vast swaths of corporate America do business with the DoD. And a lot of people in DoD took the Prohect Maven backlash a bit personally. The general tenor of the conversations I have about GCp with these folks isn't "No, just flat no". It's "NO! Oh, hellll no!" The fact that they refuse to bump their FedRamp cert to cover DoD req'ts doesn't help.
I seriously doubt a company with any significant fraction of income tied to DoD is going to ever allow it to appear that they might have ever even considered GCP.
Oracle's cloud efforts are just a footnote even when compared to the "IBM Cloud". If Google thinks hiring somebody from Oracle is going to solve their problems, they are delusional.
They'd be better off picking somebody at random from one of the flyover states then sticking to the monoculture.
Am I the only one that thinks IBM's acquisition of Softlayer did more to help Amazon than it did to help IBM? (or, more specifically, their mishandling of the acquisition)
Cloud isn't the big market, traditional hosting is. But cloud continues to grow. I thought the idea behind the Softlayer acquisition was going to be to try to funnel the much larger group of people who aren't ALL IN on cloud into some hybrid/cloud option.
Great point. I think way to reconcile may be around this data point from the original article:
> For instance, we know that AWS is the market leader with around 32 percent of market share. We know Microsoft is far back in second place with around 14 percent, the only other company in double digits. We also know that IBM and Google are wallowing in third or fourth place, depending on whose numbers you look at, stuck in single digits.
Best-case scenario, IBM / Google have 9% each, so with this still leaves 36% of the market in the hand of smaller players that both these companies can steal market share from
This is one of the main reasons I am so highly confused why Netflix is so melded with AWS. When Netflix more or less made itself 100% AWS a year or two back, I was genuinely baffled.
I think by going the "enterprise playbook" route, with an Oracle guy no less, Google are ignoring the long tail at their own peril.
With the cloud market still relatively new, a lot of the adoption decisions, especially in small and mid-sized companies, are not made at C-level, but driven (directly and indirectly) bottom up from the technical teams.
And a major driver there is familiarity with the platform. And familiarity is driven by how easy it is to quickly set something up and play around with to see if it fits your needs. Even appeal for developers' private projects could tip the scales here.
And while Google isn't so bad on the technical end of this, they certainly are when it comes to signing up and to pricing. So, ultimately, AWS has a kind of bottom-up push that G can't match and certainly won't by playing the enterprise playbook.
Add to that their track record with killing services, and their generally less than approachable support, and it's no wonder they're single-digit.
[+] [-] spricket|7 years ago|reply
Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure out how much my server would cost. They're too used to old school contracts when I can easily setup a server with many providers in 5 min with $5 for a month. IBM has never been a commodity business, but nearly everything they sell is becoming a commodity.
GCP's problem, as far as I can tell, is too much "cute" shitty documentation. And their hatred for maintaining services on a reasonable timescale. Everyone I know, even outside of tech, has lost a Google service they loved over the years to neglect. See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf?
It seems to be common knowledge that Google's infrastructure is technically the most solid of any cloud provider. That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses
[+] [-] patwolf|7 years ago|reply
I've never had a client question GCP on the basis of Google's pattern of removing services. I think people can logically separate Google's consumer-facing offerings from their paid cloud services, the same way people logically separate AWS from the Amazon store. I've never noticed a GCP service removed in the nearly 10 years I've used them. In fact, the pattern I see with GCP is that they're slower to add services , but the ones they do release are very well thought out and solid. AWS, on the other hand, seems to add tons of services, some of which are incomplete or never get traction.
I would happily use either AWS or GCP. IBM Cloud and Azure I'm far less inclined to use, although I can understand Microsoft shops wanting to use Azure. IBM Cloud is pointless.
[+] [-] politelemon|7 years ago|reply
GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support.
> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses
Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and after some experience this resonates quite well.
[+] [-] ohaideredevs|7 years ago|reply
Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious.
As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps and debugging them is a pain. Sometimes the function doesn't load at all when you change one thing, etc.
AWS was a bit of a better experience, and I think almost everyone knows what "S3" is. That is to say that AWS immediately springs to mind when you need to store BLOBs.
I have also read about people having a lot of problems with GCPs BigQuery - infrequent, but random downtimes with support not being able to figure out the issue.
Edit: As someone else said below - I do agree that all Google's services have a clear use, whereas AWS and Azure tend to have a lot that you just kind of ignore.
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|7 years ago|reply
Amazon costs go down routinely. Google costs go up or the services go away.
[+] [-] skywhopper|7 years ago|reply
If anything Golang is a counter-argument to your thesis about why GCP isn't taking off. You're right that Google has done abysmally with its commitment to keeping services running for the long haul. But Go itself has been remarkably stable and compatible over the years since its introduction. Far moreso than Python, Rust, or JS in the same time period.
[+] [-] scandox|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nik736|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manigandham|7 years ago|reply
IBM Cloud is a slowly sinking ship with the only brightspot being Watson, but nobody seems to be able to describe that clearly so there's that.
[+] [-] aedron|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harlanji|7 years ago|reply
I’ve been thinking about building a 10yr hosting plan for my own want. I thought designing static and then hosting on RasPi behind CDN would be great, just stock enough spares and keep Internet service live... 3G or better sufficient.
[+] [-] landa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jniedrauer|7 years ago|reply
This doesn't necessarily detract from your point, but this hasn't been true since the release of module support in go 1.11 last year.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sandGorgon|7 years ago|reply
Here's a very simple example - has anyone filed a ticket in Google cloud ? Well you cant, unless you are on an expensive tier of support. Even when you have one, it is super hard to file a ticket. They generally ask you to go to Google groups.
AWS and Azure ticket support is beyond awesome. Anything from issues with servers to billing. AWS has live chat support for 29$ per month. In India, the only way to get postpaid billing is through a local Google partner : Google will not do it. On AWS and Azure, it's a simple process after you hit a certain spend .
AWS Artifact is a brilliant self service tool for compliance. And I can't stress this enough - they do this country by country. They will issue digitally signed (for you) compliance documents for free. In fact, in India they went above and beyond and did specific compliance (using a big-4 consultancy) because of some regulatory changes that I highlighted.
I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service. Their entire sales org is broken.
[+] [-] sequence7|7 years ago|reply
Unfortunately it starts at $100 per user per month and that tier won't get you a number to call, just a ticketing system, and in my experience response times are in a minimum of hours. For actual production systems you're going to want the $250 per user per month option that gives you a number to call.
> I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service.
I couldn't agree more with you about this. A lot of people love to knock Azure and AWS but their support, in my experience, is in a completely different league to GCP.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-options
[+] [-] judge2020|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ec109685|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ernsheong|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|7 years ago|reply
> (...)
> Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.
I'm not an Enterprise IT expert, but looking from the outside, it doesn't seem like AWS and Azure got to where they are today by following that playbook...
My personal take on it is that AWS was first-to-market with a 21st Century-ready cloud offering (i.e. you could pretty much hear developers shouting "Yes, THIS is what I'm talking about. Finally!") and Azure got to where it is by responding quickly and aggressively, with an additional pull for certain customers due to the synergy with MS / Windows, as well as being the next best choice for those directly competing with or not willing to sign up to Amazon.
If that's true, then unless Google / IBM can really differentiate themselves, they will always lag far behind. I don't know what other plans they have in store, but opening up Watson to other platforms or hiring an Oracle sales guy are not quite what I'd call differentiators.
[+] [-] richardw|7 years ago|reply
Google is replicating Amazon now (after failing with app engine), but without the mindshare. Amazing because they are the cloud story - many cheap computers rather than huge ones. App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook.
Right now, nobody gets fired for using Amazon.
[+] [-] sanxiyn|7 years ago|reply
Modern cloud devrel seems very similar to big pharmas marketing to doctors.
[+] [-] paganel|7 years ago|reply
Now, as an aside, rumor has it that even MS's Azure numbers are a little inflated, a big part of their cloud sales is just Office 365, but I think MS does some marketing and accounting gimmicks on the side by "attaching" Azure to these Office 365 sales.
[+] [-] CBLT|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avip|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timClicks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brahma111|7 years ago|reply
The second was a more recent one where our app was discontinued from their playstore because they updated their SMS policies. All their communication were landing to my Bulk folder. Even HN has some horror stories about their 'couldn't care less' attitude.
[+] [-] asciimike|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avip|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keerthiko|7 years ago|reply
It's a boon for startups that are being quick and scrappy and haven't brought on a cloud specialist but need to use the cloud to run things regularly.
But where are the 1 year's worth of free credits ads? Or the regular meetups to hand out cloud credits and give a tech talk and promote some startup? I'm not even talking about basic customer service and support, something Google is notoriously skimpy on (although probably mandatory to build developer relations). This stuff is key. If they captured a unicorn or so, and churned out the occasional semi-corn technical founder who advocates for a gcloud stack out of SV when they move to their next gig, they will have grow their market so much better.
It's mindboggling to me that with their resources and being based in MTV, and being the single largest corporate alma mater of SV technical founders, more startups here aren't being marketed to use gcloud.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|7 years ago|reply
The total addressable market here is every non-local computational need.
That's trillions of dollars. For a market that is emerging right now, which already shows massive path dependency. So there's one time to win a slice. It can't be done later.
If I was Google's position, I wouldn't be running a profit. I'd be throwing every spare copper into Cloud to grab market share. I'd be giving away credits on street corners. Driving out at least IBM and Oracle by just drowning the market with data centre capacity. Buying my way into existing relationships. Finding folks in consumer-facing divisions who've trashed the brand ("how long until this service is canceled, ha ha ha") and pulling them up sharply. Doing whatever can be done.
I don't think Google really gets, at the highest levels, that this is the first business they have that can truly diversify them out of advertising. They seem to see it as a nice extra source of cash, rather than an existential imperative.
But then, Google hasn't got the DNA to be afraid of existential threats. It's just not something they've dealt with since they switched on the cash pumps. Meanwhile, everyone else in this fight gets it.
[+] [-] pm90|7 years ago|reply
They're both focusing on a container-native, Kubernetes oriented and opinionated cloud. They're both heavily investing in Kubernetes development, AI integrated technologies and the results are visible in the quality of their container offering. Despite their reputation for obtuseness and lack of support, as an enterprise customer, we've had fantastic support, quick turnaround on issues and the actions taken on many of our feature requests.
As a developer, I've found GCP to be somewhat behind in features BUT man their documentation is good, and easy to use. Despite this article, I would bet big on Google Cloud. They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people. Maybe its due to Google Research? But I don't see them going anywhere soon and in fact, I do see them as the next iteration of AI-heavy, big data optimized and container native cloud (sorry, couldn't resist using all of the buzzwords).
[+] [-] oblio|7 years ago|reply
There's been plenty of projects filled with very smart people that have failed.
[+] [-] mark-r|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ernsheong|7 years ago|reply
To get more hand-holding support, it's the same as AWS, i.e. you pay for it: https://cloud.google.com/support/
[+] [-] ringaroll|7 years ago|reply
Too many horror stories to even think about moving there.
This is coming from an org which spends 10M/Yr on Azure/AWS.
[+] [-] Analemma_|7 years ago|reply
But decisions about which cloud provider to use are made by C-suite executives, and they absolutely do look warily at Google, especially in comparison with Amazon (which makes basically all its profit from AWS) and Microsoft (which is obsessed with back-compat and keeping old products working as long as possible). Basic risk management and the huge cost of abruptly switching clouds will be the albatross around GCE's neck.
[+] [-] vfc1|7 years ago|reply
Firebase and the Firestore NoSQL database just out of beta are awesome products, and they are backed by Google Cloud. The ability to build a serverless application out with nearly no server code, with authentication, file upload and hosting built-in is awesome.
Plus we can have Node processes for any server code that we might absolutely need, like for signing Stripe payments.
[+] [-] carlsborg|7 years ago|reply
https://blog.clusterdyne.com/posts/new_aws_features_jan2019....
Two new services introduced and one in GA, plus multiple solid innovations like the Elastic Inference Predictors API. And this doesn't include roll-outs of existing services in new regions.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|7 years ago|reply
Also, Office 365, Exchange, AD, Sharepoint/OneDrive, Flow, and other platform lock-ins are not to be discounted.
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
Now it was possible their IBM contact was thinking of some sort of older managed hosting but he said they were talking about "cloud" for the entire meeting ... at that point it seemed IBM just thought of managed hosting as "cloud".
[+] [-] zmmmmm|7 years ago|reply
> the market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get a much bigger piece of the pie
In my circles people only talk about AWS and Google Cloud. I know there is going to be a massive segment of the market that just defaults into Azure because Microsoft .... but it seems to me that beyond that the race is pretty much over. IBM, Oracle all the others are not going to succeed beyond niche applications.
[+] [-] killjoywashere|7 years ago|reply
I seriously doubt a company with any significant fraction of income tied to DoD is going to ever allow it to appear that they might have ever even considered GCP.
[+] [-] chiph|7 years ago|reply
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-hybrid...
I'm more than a little skeptical on their ability to execute on this, given that they've let a lot of their top-talent go.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|7 years ago|reply
They'd be better off picking somebody at random from one of the flyover states then sticking to the monoculture.
[+] [-] latch|7 years ago|reply
Cloud isn't the big market, traditional hosting is. But cloud continues to grow. I thought the idea behind the Softlayer acquisition was going to be to try to funnel the much larger group of people who aren't ALL IN on cloud into some hybrid/cloud option.
[+] [-] excalibur|7 years ago|reply
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch...
[+] [-] airstrike|7 years ago|reply
> For instance, we know that AWS is the market leader with around 32 percent of market share. We know Microsoft is far back in second place with around 14 percent, the only other company in double digits. We also know that IBM and Google are wallowing in third or fourth place, depending on whose numbers you look at, stuck in single digits.
Best-case scenario, IBM / Google have 9% each, so with this still leaves 36% of the market in the hand of smaller players that both these companies can steal market share from
[+] [-] partiallypro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stupidlogin|7 years ago|reply
With the cloud market still relatively new, a lot of the adoption decisions, especially in small and mid-sized companies, are not made at C-level, but driven (directly and indirectly) bottom up from the technical teams.
And a major driver there is familiarity with the platform. And familiarity is driven by how easy it is to quickly set something up and play around with to see if it fits your needs. Even appeal for developers' private projects could tip the scales here.
And while Google isn't so bad on the technical end of this, they certainly are when it comes to signing up and to pricing. So, ultimately, AWS has a kind of bottom-up push that G can't match and certainly won't by playing the enterprise playbook.
Add to that their track record with killing services, and their generally less than approachable support, and it's no wonder they're single-digit.