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Yet another example that Google so far doesn't get the public cloud and may have hard time to catch up with Amazon Web Services. E.g. shutdown Prediction APIs

Yet another example that Google so far doesn't get the public cloud and may have hard time to catch up with Amazon Web Services. E.g. shutdown Prediction APIs, charge 70x, not enough support. I believe Google got much better tech than AWS, but the culture, support and strategy has blind spots.

_pmf_ 9y ago
> I believe Google got much better tech than AWS I get the impression Google is doing a lot of things different for the sake of doing things differently. AWS is much more pragmatic and transparent.
steego 9y ago
I think Google gets the public cloud. What they struggle with is lower margin, revenue driven, customer obsessed businesses. First, it's important to understand unless you're buying ads from Google, or renting their machines, you are not their customer. Users are inventory and they spend a lot of money trying to procure inventory (users) for their customers (advertisers). When you look at it through this lens, you can see how Google as an institution can tolerate experimenting with ideas that are disconnected from revenue models and dropping failed ideas like hot potatoes. It makes sense for them to behave that way. Amazon's services are almost always designed with either a concrete or direct path to revenue upfront and they have a huge customer support infrastructure they can tap into. They move a little slower in certain areas of R&D because customer obsessed businesses are tolerant of deprecating technology when it doesn't work out. That means they'll do more market research, take less risks and focus on tenaciously steady growth rather than trying to always hit it out of the park. When choosing a vendor, it's important to understand how their offerings affect the solvency of their business and whether it fits into their core competency. In this case, Firebase's prices were too low. That should have been a warning sign. The other warning sign is Firebase is a such a small percentage of Google's revenue, Google doesn't have a huge incentive to fix customer service issues.
- ChicagoBoy11 9y ago
  *"customer obsessed business are <less> tolerant of deprecating technology..."
  - steego 9y ago
    Yes. That's what I meant.
bendavis381 9y ago
Have you used them recently? Their support has been extremely good in my experience, and I'm far from a premium customer. Email/phone support readily available. Loads of their engineers available over slack.

_pmf_ 9y ago

> I believe Google got much better tech than AWS I get the impression Google is doing a lot of things different for the sake of doing things differently. AWS is much more pragmatic and transparent.

steego 9y ago

I think Google gets the public cloud. What they struggle with is lower margin, revenue driven, customer obsessed businesses. First, it's important to understand unless you're buying ads from Google, or renting their machines, you are not their customer. Users are inventory and they spend a lot of money trying to procure inventory (users) for their customers (advertisers). When you look at it through this lens, you can see how Google as an institution can tolerate experimenting with ideas that are disconnected from revenue models and dropping failed ideas like hot potatoes. It makes sense for them to behave that way. Amazon's services are almost always designed with either a concrete or direct path to revenue upfront and they have a huge customer support infrastructure they can tap into. They move a little slower in certain areas of R&D because customer obsessed businesses are tolerant of deprecating technology when it doesn't work out. That means they'll do more market research, take less risks and focus on tenaciously steady growth rather than trying to always hit it out of the park. When choosing a vendor, it's important to understand how their offerings affect the solvency of their business and whether it fits into their core competency. In this case, Firebase's prices were too low. That should have been a warning sign. The other warning sign is Firebase is a such a small percentage of Google's revenue, Google doesn't have a huge incentive to fix customer service issues.

ChicagoBoy11 9y ago
*"customer obsessed business are <less> tolerant of deprecating technology..."
- steego 9y ago
  Yes. That's what I meant.

bendavis381 9y ago

Have you used them recently? Their support has been extremely good in my experience, and I'm far from a premium customer. Email/phone support readily available. Loads of their engineers available over slack.