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> 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 l

by 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.
- solatic 10y ago
  But that's exactly what Google's Customer Reliability Engineering addresses. CRE says to the enterprise customer, if you're willing to bring your software up to Google's standards, then the guy answering the 4am call when downstream screws up will be some of those same engineers who give Google its legendary reliability, and not one of the enterprise's engineers with little experience on GCP. Those standards are the difference between a hack backed up by sales engineers and "premier support" and a tech manager who never finds out that anything was amiss because all the failovers just worked. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-a-new-era-of-customer-support-Google-Customer-Reliability-Engineering.html?m=1 https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-a-n... FWIW I work in one of these places with crazy institutional conservatism

by solatic 10y ago

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.

solatic 10y ago
But that's exactly what Google's Customer Reliability Engineering addresses. CRE says to the enterprise customer, if you're willing to bring your software up to Google's standards, then the guy answering the 4am call when downstream screws up will be some of those same engineers who give Google its legendary reliability, and not one of the enterprise's engineers with little experience on GCP. Those standards are the difference between a hack backed up by sales engineers and "premier support" and a tech manager who never finds out that anything was amiss because all the failovers just worked. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-a-new-era-of-customer-support-Google-Customer-Reliability-Engineering.html?m=1 https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-a-n... FWIW I work in one of these places with crazy institutional conservatism