9 ms·

I can't agree more. I work in an enterprise place and we discuss this frequently. Even worse than AWS is Google, they just don't get the fact that Technical Ma

I can't agree more. I work in an enterprise place and we discuss this frequently. Even worse than AWS is Google, they just don't get the fact that Technical Managers at big enterprise places want hand-hold turn-key solutions. The amount of money they leave on the table is mind-bending. You go to Google and say "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?" I've heard "Amazon and Google don't understand enterprise" at least a dozen times in the last couple of months. You don't hear that about Microsoft. Coming from a startup/open source/indie background I thought AWS and Google would be eating the world but at least in enterprise they appear to be missing a big opportunity.

obulpathi 10y ago
> "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?" This is a feature(?) of AWS. Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. AWS provides nuts and bolts and tell you to integrate them.
- reggieband 10y ago
  > Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. That is not my experience. In fact, you just need to look at the Google Cloud documentation solution use cases. For example: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-analysis-telemetry https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-anal... (chosen more or less at random). You need: * Cloud pub/sub * Cloud dataflow * Big Query * Cloud datalab They don't stitch all that together for you. Nor do they have a good way of calculating how much each of those services will cost when used in conjunction with each other.
  - obulpathi 10y ago
    If you are looking for a solution for mobile analytics: https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/ https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/ If you want a customizable solution, you connect the tools. Pub/Sub for streaming, Dataflow for processing data, Big Query for Data Analytics (Warehousing), Datalab is your development environment. Its hard for a single solution to serve 100% of customer needs. That why they suggest tools. Care to share what a better technology stack looks like? I would love to know if there are better alternatives for services like Google App Engine, Google Cloud Load Balancer, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, TensorFlow Cloud ML, Container Engine (Kubernetes), Stack Driver, ... Speaking about cost, its all flat rate, with usage discounts (the more you use, the more discount you get) and there are no upfront payments / reservations / locking / hourly billings (like AWS)
    - reggieband 10y ago
      > If you are looking for a solution for mobile analytics I'm not at all, that example was pulled at random as an example. > Its hard for a single solution to serve 100% of customer needs. That why they suggest tools. It would be hard to describe just how custom of a solution my company would need. My company certainly likes to do things in a unique way. However there is a huge grey area between "here is a specific product that doesn't quite fit your needs" and "here are the blocks you need to build a custom solution on your own". That grey area is filled with money. > I would love to know if there are better alternatives for services like ... Don't underestimate the ability of large enterprise to roll their own. It isn't like Google is the only company that can build a message queue or a load balancer. Nor are they the only game in town selling them. This is a time to remember: The customer is always right. You and I may think that "Google is the best" but my manager wants what my manager wants. We may select a lesser solution simply because the support is significantly better. And that support should be vertically integrated. If we have support for pub sub, support for big query but not support for the integration between them ... that is a drawback. > Speaking about cost, its all flat rate Not really. For example data flow is based on the size of machine you are running (plus some extra percentage for the service), pub sub is based on number of events, big query is based on query time + egress, etc. I probably still have the spreadsheet I used to try to get a handle on costs kicking around somewhere. "Flat rate" does not describe the monstrosity that is that spreadsheet. I totally understand that some people don't understand the enterprise mentality. I'm not trying to defend it - maybe just give a small view into it. Now that I live in it, I may not agree with it, but I understand it. Google doesn't.
- scurvy 10y ago
  Ironically, that's the way that Microsoft used to operate. They were very big on providing the platform and API, then insisting that partners built the solutions. That was back in the Gates and Ballmer era. I guess that they've learned from that major mistake.
- nl 10y ago
  I have a perfect example for how little Google understands Enterprise. This issue[1] affects almost every enterprise developer using this product (the original AppEngine) and has been open since 2008 (Nearly 10 years!). I provided a (awful!) work around in 2010[2] for the Java version, and there are similarly dreadful hacks for the Python version. It would be trivial for Google to implement one of these fixes. Google just doesn't care at all. [1] https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=544 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5... [2] https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=544#c11 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5...
stcredzero 10y ago
Technical Managers at big enterprise places want hand-hold turn-key solutions. Ding-ding-ding-ding! Now, if you can do this at a lower price point than the competition (i.e. through real technical innovation and without giving in to the temptation to charge your customers out the wazoo, because it's funny money to them, and they are uncertain and afraid) you will prosper!
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  You can't do it at low cost though, selling to enterprises is demanding in terms of resources, you can't afford to sell to them unless you are making a ton of money out of each sale. One of Joel Spolsky's better articles[1] talks about this. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
nihonde 10y ago
Enterprise customers are fussy and involve a painful sales cycle. If I were in a position to choose, I'd always favor a consumer/retail market for commodity infrastructure services.
- mattzito 10y ago
  Enterprise customers are also vastly more sticky and vastly less price-conscious than a consumer/retail customer. I completely agree about the sales cycle part, but it's amazing how locked-in enterprise customers will allow themselves to be.
solatic 10y ago
> hand-hold turn-key solutions And this is why the enterprise sector is so terrible. Everyone thinks that magic genies come out of lamps, if only you rub the lamp with enough money. It's why enterprises get solutions which, again and again, are unperformant, don't meet their actual needs, deliver poor satisfaction, and eventually end up costing the company in reputation and business in the long run. You can't take hand-configured and hand-tuned monolithic systems and load them into the cloud, not anymore than you could take mainframe code and write a nice C wrapper for it. Sure, there are all kinds of hacks, but then, what you're really doing is selling marketing to the shareholders, not meaningfully improving the underlying engineering. Of course Microsoft can make a ton of money selling some of these hacks to enterprises. After all, the customer is always right. But that kind of mindset is completely foreign to Google's culture. If you won't tolerate crummy hacks in your internal engineering, why would you sell a crummy hack to your customers?
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > But that kind of mindset is completely foreign to Google's culture. If you won't tolerate crummy hacks in your internal engineering I imagine you don't have experience doing Android development.
- reggieband 10y ago
  > It's why enterprises get solutions which, again and again, are unperformant, don't meet their actual needs, deliver poor satisfaction ... This is a caricature that I would also have believed until I was involved in it. It's the vision of some lumbering dinosaur stumbling to it's death, bloated with age and cranky. There is definitely some truth to it but like all caricatures that truth is greatly exaggerated. The reality is a lot more subtle. In many cases it is decades of institutional experience that creates a deep conservatism. > [...] Microsoft can make a ton of money selling some of these hacks to enterprises I think this is the negative way to view it and again the reality is different. The conservatism is the opposite than what you think. If I say "we need to stitch together these base systems ..." the questions I get are "How to do we monitor the integrations? Who gets called at 4am when something downstream goes down? Who ensures those integrations are kept up-to-date over the lifetime of the project? What are the ongoing maintenance tasks and who does them?" etc. They are in fact trying to overprotect themselves against hack solutions since these systems may live decades. All of those questions have answers of course, but they are additional pieces of planning and infrastructure that we have to bring to the table. They are also questions that must be answered before we even consider beginning a project. So I think it is more fair to see Microsoft not as "selling hacks" but more as being a patient guide through all of the peculiar institutional conservatisms. They speak the right language and take the time to understand the concerns of the managers.
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
Maybe that is a strength, selling low cost solutions in volume is completely different to high margin enterprise sales. I'm pretty sure you can't excel at both, you need to decide what you are and it seems clear to me Amazon and Google are both in the first segment and Microsoft is heading (retreating?) towards the second.

obulpathi 10y ago

> "We need to do X" and they say "Here is product Y that connects to product Z, but you need to write your own connector." And each product has it's own pricing structure (one by CPU usage, one with flat fees, one based on throughput) so working out total cost is a nightmare. Then you have to hire around those techs, project manage the build of the infrastructure, etc. At that point you start to ask "Why are we using them again?" This is a feature(?) of AWS. Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. AWS provides nuts and bolts and tell you to integrate them.

reggieband 10y ago
> Google Cloud provides fully built solutions for majority of use cases. That is not my experience. In fact, you just need to look at the Google Cloud documentation solution use cases. For example: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-analysis-telemetry https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-anal... (chosen more or less at random). You need: * Cloud pub/sub * Cloud dataflow * Big Query * Cloud datalab They don't stitch all that together for you. Nor do they have a good way of calculating how much each of those services will cost when used in conjunction with each other.
- obulpathi 10y ago
  If you are looking for a solution for mobile analytics: https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/ https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/ If you want a customizable solution, you connect the tools. Pub/Sub for streaming, Dataflow for processing data, Big Query for Data Analytics (Warehousing), Datalab is your development environment. Its hard for a single solution to serve 100% of customer needs. That why they suggest tools. Care to share what a better technology stack looks like? I would love to know if there are better alternatives for services like Google App Engine, Google Cloud Load Balancer, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, TensorFlow Cloud ML, Container Engine (Kubernetes), Stack Driver, ... Speaking about cost, its all flat rate, with usage discounts (the more you use, the more discount you get) and there are no upfront payments / reservations / locking / hourly billings (like AWS)
  - reggieband 10y ago
    > If you are looking for a solution for mobile analytics I'm not at all, that example was pulled at random as an example. > Its hard for a single solution to serve 100% of customer needs. That why they suggest tools. It would be hard to describe just how custom of a solution my company would need. My company certainly likes to do things in a unique way. However there is a huge grey area between "here is a specific product that doesn't quite fit your needs" and "here are the blocks you need to build a custom solution on your own". That grey area is filled with money. > I would love to know if there are better alternatives for services like ... Don't underestimate the ability of large enterprise to roll their own. It isn't like Google is the only company that can build a message queue or a load balancer. Nor are they the only game in town selling them. This is a time to remember: The customer is always right. You and I may think that "Google is the best" but my manager wants what my manager wants. We may select a lesser solution simply because the support is significantly better. And that support should be vertically integrated. If we have support for pub sub, support for big query but not support for the integration between them ... that is a drawback. > Speaking about cost, its all flat rate Not really. For example data flow is based on the size of machine you are running (plus some extra percentage for the service), pub sub is based on number of events, big query is based on query time + egress, etc. I probably still have the spreadsheet I used to try to get a handle on costs kicking around somewhere. "Flat rate" does not describe the monstrosity that is that spreadsheet. I totally understand that some people don't understand the enterprise mentality. I'm not trying to defend it - maybe just give a small view into it. Now that I live in it, I may not agree with it, but I understand it. Google doesn't.
scurvy 10y ago
Ironically, that's the way that Microsoft used to operate. They were very big on providing the platform and API, then insisting that partners built the solutions. That was back in the Gates and Ballmer era. I guess that they've learned from that major mistake.
nl 10y ago
I have a perfect example for how little Google understands Enterprise. This issue[1] affects almost every enterprise developer using this product (the original AppEngine) and has been open since 2008 (Nearly 10 years!). I provided a (awful!) work around in 2010[2] for the Java version, and there are similarly dreadful hacks for the Python version. It would be trivial for Google to implement one of these fixes. Google just doesn't care at all. [1] https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=544 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5... [2] https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=544#c11 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5...

stcredzero 10y ago

Technical Managers at big enterprise places want hand-hold turn-key solutions. Ding-ding-ding-ding! Now, if you can do this at a lower price point than the competition (i.e. through real technical innovation and without giving in to the temptation to charge your customers out the wazoo, because it's funny money to them, and they are uncertain and afraid) you will prosper!

tonyedgecombe 10y ago
You can't do it at low cost though, selling to enterprises is demanding in terms of resources, you can't afford to sell to them unless you are making a ton of money out of each sale. One of Joel Spolsky's better articles[1] talks about this. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

nihonde 10y ago

Enterprise customers are fussy and involve a painful sales cycle. If I were in a position to choose, I'd always favor a consumer/retail market for commodity infrastructure services.

mattzito 10y ago
Enterprise customers are also vastly more sticky and vastly less price-conscious than a consumer/retail customer. I completely agree about the sales cycle part, but it's amazing how locked-in enterprise customers will allow themselves to be.

solatic 10y ago

> hand-hold turn-key solutions And this is why the enterprise sector is so terrible. Everyone thinks that magic genies come out of lamps, if only you rub the lamp with enough money. It's why enterprises get solutions which, again and again, are unperformant, don't meet their actual needs, deliver poor satisfaction, and eventually end up costing the company in reputation and business in the long run. You can't take hand-configured and hand-tuned monolithic systems and load them into the cloud, not anymore than you could take mainframe code and write a nice C wrapper for it. Sure, there are all kinds of hacks, but then, what you're really doing is selling marketing to the shareholders, not meaningfully improving the underlying engineering. Of course Microsoft can make a ton of money selling some of these hacks to enterprises. After all, the customer is always right. But that kind of mindset is completely foreign to Google's culture. If you won't tolerate crummy hacks in your internal engineering, why would you sell a crummy hack to your customers?

pjmlp 10y ago
> But that kind of mindset is completely foreign to Google's culture. If you won't tolerate crummy hacks in your internal engineering I imagine you don't have experience doing Android development.
reggieband 10y ago
> It's why enterprises get solutions which, again and again, are unperformant, don't meet their actual needs, deliver poor satisfaction ... This is a caricature that I would also have believed until I was involved in it. It's the vision of some lumbering dinosaur stumbling to it's death, bloated with age and cranky. There is definitely some truth to it but like all caricatures that truth is greatly exaggerated. The reality is a lot more subtle. In many cases it is decades of institutional experience that creates a deep conservatism. > [...] Microsoft can make a ton of money selling some of these hacks to enterprises I think this is the negative way to view it and again the reality is different. The conservatism is the opposite than what you think. If I say "we need to stitch together these base systems ..." the questions I get are "How to do we monitor the integrations? Who gets called at 4am when something downstream goes down? Who ensures those integrations are kept up-to-date over the lifetime of the project? What are the ongoing maintenance tasks and who does them?" etc. They are in fact trying to overprotect themselves against hack solutions since these systems may live decades. All of those questions have answers of course, but they are additional pieces of planning and infrastructure that we have to bring to the table. They are also questions that must be answered before we even consider beginning a project. So I think it is more fair to see Microsoft not as "selling hacks" but more as being a patient guide through all of the peculiar institutional conservatisms. They speak the right language and take the time to understand the concerns of the managers.

tonyedgecombe 10y ago

Maybe that is a strength, selling low cost solutions in volume is completely different to high margin enterprise sales. I'm pretty sure you can't excel at both, you need to decide what you are and it seems clear to me Amazon and Google are both in the first segment and Microsoft is heading (retreating?) towards the second.