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It's especially interesting when you consider that Google has now, for the first time, a fully globe-spanning own network that can interface with any ISP direct

It's especially interesting when you consider that Google has now, for the first time, a fully globe-spanning own network that can interface with any ISP directly, without relying on any intermediate ISP. Google now has at least one product in the entire stack of the internet. You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server. At this point you can use most of the functionality of the internet without ever leaving the Google ecosystem. And this is just going to be expanded.

georgeecollins 9y ago
But also Google is so terrible at making successful physical products in a lot of these spaces, its hard to say the products give them a lot of power in the market. Google Pixel, Google Home, Google TV, do not represent large install bases. If they want a walled garden, it can't be the size of a postage stamp.
- kuschku 9y ago
  But that's not for a lack of trying. Google has launched 5 social networks, 4 messaging apps, and dozens of phones by now. The only reason it's not yet a walled garden is because Google is incompetent at it for now, but we can't bet the future of the open web on that.
- brango 9y ago
  Not just physical devices. A lot of the Google stuff I have to use seems half-baked, unfinished or with crappy UI/UX. And Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS. I guess that's what happens when engineers lead a company. They'll never have the customer focus that has made Amazon dominant.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    > Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS that is a bold statement. care to elaborate?
    - brango 9y ago
      Well for a start you have to stop a GCE instance to add a new scope to it. So if your devs want to use a new API and you're running a massive production K8s cluster, you somehow have to stop your instances to add the new scope and otherwise mess around. Of course if you know this in advance you can plan to do blue-green deployments with K8s, but if you don't know that you won't architect for it and it'll bite you. Their authentication in general seems convoluted and complicated, their console is slow and useless (why aren't all the search results preloaded? I type in 'iam' and it takes several seconds for the results to appear). Oh, and also alpha K8s clusters will terminate after 30 days whether you like it or not (perhaps you're using a feature that's apparently stable but languishing in alpha - I'm looking at you, cronjob). There's a lack of services in general (an elasticache type service would be nice) and development seems to move glacially. Also, they seem to have multiple versions of SDKs, some with outstanding bugs that were reported years ago but are just closed or there are comments in the README that only critical bugs will be addressed. There's no indication which SDK to use where there are several versions. Oh, and if you only want to use one service in python, you have to install about 40 different packages because splitting them up is too difficult. We've had DFP buckets have their configs get screwed up so we mysteriously couldn't access them, logs stopped being delivered, etc. Apparently Google have such poor monitoring that we had to prompt them about these things which took too longer to get resolved. I could go on...
      - chusk3 9y ago
        Holy smokes I feel you on the cronjob thing. They just went to beta with it in k8s 1.8, so now I'm waiting for that to get stable on GKE. That plus a managed Redis/memcached would be all that I need right now.
      - stanley 9y ago
        An easy workaround for the scope issue is to set a custom service account when creating the instance (template). You can then modify the IAM roles for that service account without having to take the instance offline. Allow that service account to have full access to all APIs on the instance level, then fine-tune what's actually possible through IAM Roles.
dictum 9y ago
> You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server. ...viewing content authorized by Google DRM. > "After taking a look backstage, we can confirm that after recent updates Safari is no longer a supported browser for Web Player" > Riegelstamm further dug into the details of the Web Player, discovering that the discontinuing of Safari support might have something to do with Google's Widevine media optimizer plugin, which Spotify requires for music streaming on the web and Apple opposes due to potential security issues. https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/08/spotify-web-player-no-safari/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/08/spotify-web-player-no-s...
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Echoing that i felt there was a change in the way they handled Android the day they announce that the Android Marketplace (later rebranded the Google Play Store) would be offering movies (musics joined them a few months later). Soon after the storage handling in Android got that much more convoluted, making it much harder to get data out of an Android devices without there being some kind of Google daemon sitting between user and storage.
  - grawprog 9y ago
    Yeah I remember how much worse it was going from Android 2 to 4 as far as accessing storage was but 4 to 7 seems even worse. I've found KDE connect to be the best option for me so far for accessing android storage. Though as far as I know you need to have a KDE desktop environment to use it.
neolefty 9y ago
My impression is that their purpose isn't to take the market, but to provide an example that others can emulate. If a Nexus is so much better than a Samsung, then Samsung will improve until that is no longer the case, to everyone's benefit. Likewise with Fi and Fiber. These are minority services and destined to remain so. Google's core competency will probably never by customer service.

georgeecollins 9y ago

But also Google is so terrible at making successful physical products in a lot of these spaces, its hard to say the products give them a lot of power in the market. Google Pixel, Google Home, Google TV, do not represent large install bases. If they want a walled garden, it can't be the size of a postage stamp.

kuschku 9y ago
But that's not for a lack of trying. Google has launched 5 social networks, 4 messaging apps, and dozens of phones by now. The only reason it's not yet a walled garden is because Google is incompetent at it for now, but we can't bet the future of the open web on that.
brango 9y ago
Not just physical devices. A lot of the Google stuff I have to use seems half-baked, unfinished or with crappy UI/UX. And Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS. I guess that's what happens when engineers lead a company. They'll never have the customer focus that has made Amazon dominant.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS that is a bold statement. care to elaborate?
  - brango 9y ago
    Well for a start you have to stop a GCE instance to add a new scope to it. So if your devs want to use a new API and you're running a massive production K8s cluster, you somehow have to stop your instances to add the new scope and otherwise mess around. Of course if you know this in advance you can plan to do blue-green deployments with K8s, but if you don't know that you won't architect for it and it'll bite you. Their authentication in general seems convoluted and complicated, their console is slow and useless (why aren't all the search results preloaded? I type in 'iam' and it takes several seconds for the results to appear). Oh, and also alpha K8s clusters will terminate after 30 days whether you like it or not (perhaps you're using a feature that's apparently stable but languishing in alpha - I'm looking at you, cronjob). There's a lack of services in general (an elasticache type service would be nice) and development seems to move glacially. Also, they seem to have multiple versions of SDKs, some with outstanding bugs that were reported years ago but are just closed or there are comments in the README that only critical bugs will be addressed. There's no indication which SDK to use where there are several versions. Oh, and if you only want to use one service in python, you have to install about 40 different packages because splitting them up is too difficult. We've had DFP buckets have their configs get screwed up so we mysteriously couldn't access them, logs stopped being delivered, etc. Apparently Google have such poor monitoring that we had to prompt them about these things which took too longer to get resolved. I could go on...
    - chusk3 9y ago
      Holy smokes I feel you on the cronjob thing. They just went to beta with it in k8s 1.8, so now I'm waiting for that to get stable on GKE. That plus a managed Redis/memcached would be all that I need right now.
    - stanley 9y ago
      An easy workaround for the scope issue is to set a custom service account when creating the instance (template). You can then modify the IAM roles for that service account without having to take the instance offline. Allow that service account to have full access to all APIs on the instance level, then fine-tune what's actually possible through IAM Roles.

dictum 9y ago

> You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server. ...viewing content authorized by Google DRM. > "After taking a look backstage, we can confirm that after recent updates Safari is no longer a supported browser for Web Player" > Riegelstamm further dug into the details of the Web Player, discovering that the discontinuing of Safari support might have something to do with Google's Widevine media optimizer plugin, which Spotify requires for music streaming on the web and Apple opposes due to potential security issues. https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/08/spotify-web-player-no-safari/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/08/spotify-web-player-no-s...

digi_owl 9y ago
Echoing that i felt there was a change in the way they handled Android the day they announce that the Android Marketplace (later rebranded the Google Play Store) would be offering movies (musics joined them a few months later). Soon after the storage handling in Android got that much more convoluted, making it much harder to get data out of an Android devices without there being some kind of Google daemon sitting between user and storage.
- grawprog 9y ago
  Yeah I remember how much worse it was going from Android 2 to 4 as far as accessing storage was but 4 to 7 seems even worse. I've found KDE connect to be the best option for me so far for accessing android storage. Though as far as I know you need to have a KDE desktop environment to use it.

neolefty 9y ago

My impression is that their purpose isn't to take the market, but to provide an example that others can emulate. If a Nexus is so much better than a Samsung, then Samsung will improve until that is no longer the case, to everyone's benefit. Likewise with Fi and Fiber. These are minority services and destined to remain so. Google's core competency will probably never by customer service.