21 ms·

Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

166 points by deanmoriarty 8y ago

zmmmmm 8y ago
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.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  In my circles a lot of non-Microsoft people talk about Azure.
  - kerng 8y ago
    Yeah, same here. Microsoft seems to really change people's minds these days. Many of my friends disliked them, but now see them as a great option compared to AWS lock in. I think Azure has a strong offering, but that Portal UI, oh my...
    - discordance 8y ago
      Yeah the portal UI sucks. Anyone seriously using Azure is probably using az-cli, ARM templates, terraform etc.
- fierro 8y ago
  anecdata; I have never met a dev or a shop that uses Azure. Maybe the SF bay area is so heavily AWS/GCP that's all I hear about, but I have had the same experience as you
  - oblio 8y ago
    The Bay Area is a bubble. A huge bubble, but still a bubble.
excalibur 8y ago
Related, seemingly contradictory: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch-vs-aws-we-wont-compete-with-you.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch...
- airstrike 8y ago
  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
- partiallypro 8y ago
  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.
  - dsl 8y ago
    > Netflix is so melded with AWS. But it isn't. Netflix core service (video streaming) runs entirely on hardware they produce that runs in their own datacenters and embedded in ISPs. Billing, account management, video transcoding, etc. happen in AWS, but all that stuff can go down and customers don't get that upset.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      You haven’t seen Netflix’s AWS ReInvent talks.....
    - T2_t2 8y ago
      Video transcoding is particularly suited to the cloud. This sort if unpredictable load - new titles will pop up at odd intervals - is ideal for striking the balance between speed to market (you don't want to delay releasing new titles) and cost (having extra capacity for transcoding on the off chance you need it is expensive). Spool up hundreds of servers when they need to get a new title out, and buy them at cheapish rates is pretty much what the cloud was built for.
carlsborg 8y ago
Its incredibly hard to catch up. The following is a list of new major AWS functionality delivered just in the month of January: https://blog.clusterdyne.com/posts/new_aws_features_jan2019.html 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 8y ago
  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.
  - solotronics 8y ago
    is there any cloud thats "fully baked" in comparison to AWS?
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      No cloud provider is fully baked, that included AWS. Every single one of them has their own set of drawbacks.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I think it’s less of a cloud to cloud comparison, and more of a feature to feature comparison. Even AWS is half baked depending on the service (although the core services are rock solid, like S3, EC2, Cloudfront, and parts of RDS). Azure’s console has all sorts of intermittency/consistency issues, and they recently lost customer data due to how encrypted database data was inadvertently discarded due to a DNS failure scenario.
chid 8y ago
what about Oracle/Alibaba clouds?
- jhwang5 8y ago
  Fun fact: Aliyun (Alibaba cloud) has more revenue than GCP
  - skc 8y ago
    So I just took a look at their offering and was shocked to see just how many services they offer. Way more than I had anticipated for a provider I don't really hear too much about.
  - discordance 8y ago
    Love the Aliyun portal UI. By far the simplest and most accessible cloud portal UI when compared to AWS, Azure or GCP. Digital Ocean UI also awesome if you consider them a player in the field.
- keypusher 8y ago
  Oracle is not even in contention. Not only do they lack the expertise, they have a terrible reputation and offer nothing unique. Alibaba is a different story. China is a huge market that western companies typically stuggle in, and many of the large businesses there do not have the infrastructure debt of older US companies. Alibaba has massive infrastructure, strong technical expertise and their cloud offering has been expanding rapidly, I would definitely watch out for them.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    Alibaba can definitely take a huge chunk of the Chinese market - but internationally? They're Chinese. General opinion in Western politics is to distrust Chinese-controlled stuff, as evidenced by the handling of the Huawei case.
    - nradov 8y ago
airstrike 8y ago
> 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.
- timClicks 8y ago
  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.
  - dsl 8y ago
    Joyent's failure was chasing the latest agile, devops, micro kernel, etc. hotness that was taking off in the valley. They completely ignored the fact that the big companies with huge budgets are full of people who don't give a shit about SmartOS resource grids and just want easy and similar enough to what they already know/run. People tried to label Amazon Lightsail as a "DigitalOcean killer", it was really a way to lower the bar of intimidation for the IT guys at paper mills and car seat factories.
- CBLT 8y ago
  My anecdata is that Microsoft used salespeople to talk to executives and give them a deal on Azure so good they couldn't pass it up.
latch 8y ago
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.
- toast0 8y ago
  As a customer of Softlayer, I haven't noticed very much from the acquisition. Support has gotten a bit worse, but our account has also gotten smaller, so I'm not sure if we were getting special treatment before. I still think the old portal was faster, and login via IBMid is dumb, but the servers still work, the network still pretty much works, and it feels like their networking monitoring got somewhat better. Their pricing got kind of weird though. And they expanded their locations significantly. We're leaving Softlayer, but to an acquirer's infrastructure, not to Amazon.
  - latch 8y ago
    I didn't mean to imply that it got worse for existing customers. But I feel like by killing the Softlayer brand (softlayer.com is just a landing page where everything redirect to IBM cloud) and making "cloud" the focus, they're missing out on new business (including winning back people to baremetal who are tired of AWS' poor price/performance). Maybe they still are and I'm just not paying enough attention, but Softlayer was essentially the _top_ choice for dedicated hosting for the large number of customers that wanted something more reliable than OVH without having to go to Rackspace. I feel like they just walked about from that. Or, more to my point, that they're neglecting driving business to it to a point where it's actually helping AWS grow.
- fierro 8y ago
  "cloud isn't the big market" sorry lost me there
  - dragandj 8y ago
Analemma_ 8y ago
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.
- keypusher 8y ago
  At startups and even medium sized tech companies, these decisions are often driven by engineering/ops teams and not by executives. I was on a team trying to decide between staying with AWS and moving to GCP about a year ago, at a company that spends well over $1M/year on infrastructure. The fact that Google has a track record of abandoning products with active users and has repeatedly shown they do not know how to deal with customers was absolutely part of the reason we decided to stay with AWS. I respect the engineering at Google immensely, and I would be willing to reconsider in a few years, but they need to prove their commitment first. They literally just killed another product today (Android Things)!
  - ernsheong 8y ago
    Looks like GCP needs to sorely address this (mis)perception, and ensure their commitments to GCP is separate from the consumer business. But really, GCP is not the same as the consumer-facing products. GCP already has a lot of clout, and literally nothing I know in GCP has been deprecated/chopped just like that. GCP already has a huge following in its own right and it's very unlikely for GCP stuff to be axed, given how careful they are with implementing new features (I have interacted with numerous engineers, and often feature requests are taken with a lot of valid pushback to prevent feature creep).
    - 8y ago
aboutruby 8y ago
From a user point of view I much prefer AWS than Google Cloud (and I got used to the AWS names). Also as AWS is what basically everyone used, all the tooling is built mainly around it and sometimes support Google Cloud but it's not very well tested / supported. All that steams basically from being the leader by a vast margin.
- ernsheong 8y ago
  Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is much simpler from a developer standpoint. AWS might have 20 tools to solve 20 problems, GCP has 5 tools to solve 20 problems (that's my observation). The tools provided by GCP itself will help you get the job done. AWS never really clicked for me, terrible UI/UX, too many steps to get things done. GCP is the opposite when it comes to ease of doing most things. When I started using GCP, I had a "wow" and "aha" moment: this is how a cloud should be. Give GCP a shot ;)
  - takeda 8y ago
    I played with both, and I think in terms of what's easier is probably which one you used first, although I must admit that they are constantly adding new services, so perhaps for people that are starting now might get confusing to know which are the core services and which are just extra. They should simplify their console to list just core stuff, and put the other stuff on separate page. They have their own strengths and weaknesses. What jumped out to me is when I tried Google is I believe that Google has superior network infrastructure that lets them do some things that are hard to do in AWS, especially seamless integration of networking between regions, internal IPs also don't seem to be tied to individual zones etc. On the other hand, some services are just awful. I tried Deployment Manager, and while looks like it is a nice design that makes it more powerful than Cloud Formation, it is still buggy. Seeing that I'm now not surprised that terraform is so popular. I don't think it is that much better compared to CF, but if you use DM you must be a masochist.
- jhwang5 8y ago
  What people don't get is that all AWS services work seamlessly with each other. There's no use major use case that AWS don't provide a solve for. If you already use EC2 and S3, then it's obviously lower hurdle to also use RDS, Dynamo, etc. Then before you know it, you are using Lambda, ECS, etc. To sum it up, anyone who says GCP is easier to use than AWS don't understand the power of having the most feature-rich ecosystem.
shereadsthenews 8y ago
Alternative interpretation: Google's Cloud is ridiculously large, but they occupy 99% of it with their own product.
ummonk 8y ago
Wait. AWS only has 32% market share? That is way less than I would have guessed.
- cobookman 8y ago
  32% of `cloud` marketshare. Cloud includes things like Salesforce's SaaS, Oracle DB in the cloud, Office 365, gSuite, ...etc. I'm sure if you look at Compute, Storage, and Networking cloud spend, AWS has a much higher marketshare.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    Okay yeah, that makes sense.
duxup 8y ago
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".
mark-r 8y ago
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?
- ernsheong 8y ago
  You can go to https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers and open a ticket at the respective product issue tracker. To get more hand-holding support, it's the same as AWS, i.e. you pay for it: https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/
  - rexarex 8y ago
    Hostile answer further discredits google support
    - ernsheong 8y ago
      How is this answer hostile?
  - mark-r 8y ago
    It would be interesting to hear some contrasting reports from people who have actually needed support.
sandGorgon 8y ago
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.
- ernsheong 8y ago
  You can go to https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers and open a ticket at the respective product public issue tracker without a paid support plan.
  - sandGorgon 8y ago
    These are issue trackers. I'm not reporting a bug in Google. I want support on "how to do X" or "I purchased this reserved instance by accident, can I get a refund".
    - ernsheong 8y ago
      Fair enough. For questions, Stack Overflow is what they usually point to. Sometimes GCP staff logs on and answers, otherwise the community. For the refund scenario, I found this: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues You can also vent in their feedback widget within Console. To my surprise the product managers actually read it, and sometimes respond back for more information. There's also a UserVoice forum to voice out feature requests for each product: https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-google-cloud-platform https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-goog...
Brahma111 8y ago
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.
- avip 8y ago
  Let me guess: "the tier that we were in" was the free tier?
  - dragandj 8y ago
    May be so, but Google made sure that "the tier they were in" stays "nothing by Google, ever" for that particular company.
  - jussij 8y ago
    And it may well be that "the tier that we were in" was the free tier. But my question would be why did Google enter a paying field with a free option, knowing full well it would kill off all those paying players, to only then kill their free option knowing all competition is now gone? Google should not be offering up any service, free or otherwise that has a use by date that is only known to Google.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- asciimike 8y ago
  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.
pm90 8y ago
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).
- oblio 8y ago
  > They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people. There's been plenty of projects filled with very smart people that have failed.
  - pm90 8y ago
    I think my comment mentioned a lot of reasons why they might succeed and not just because they're staffed with smart people. Cherry-picking a statement like this really adds no value to the discussion.
kerng 8y ago
I'm not sure if hiring an Oracle person will change much here. GCP lacks with features and is so focused on Kubernetes alone. Biggest issue with Google is support and lack of diverse options. I have never used IBM, so can't comment on their experience - but IBM always had good sales and consulting teams. Maybe both should team up?
keerthiko 8y ago
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.
- withdavidli 8y ago
  They did this when I first moved to the valley in 2013. Found them sponsoring hackathons and giving away GCP at 10k-50k free first year for just participating, prizes for winning hackathon was, I believe, actual cash plus 50k+ more GCP. But not sure if they kept up the sponsorships.
- avip 8y ago
  Anecdotally, I spoke with both gcp and aws reps in previous startup (not in US), and both told me the "take free 500K in credits" party is over. YMMV
  - boulos 8y ago
    Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I don't think we ever offered $500k, but have consistently done $100k for up to a year. There were definitely lots of startups that would chase credits across us, AWS and Azure (who at least at one point would do $300k). While I think it's great to ride free credits while you can, it's probably a mistake if your company is changing infrastructure each year in search of free dollars. And even worse if you do so at a huge hit to your productivity and ultimate product success.
vfc1 8y ago
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.
- discordance 8y ago
  If all you're doing is building web apps then that sounds pretty good. Pretty certain any large enterprise cloud workload that gcp/azure/AWS is interested in is a lot more than that. Data warehousing, Kafka stuff, identity management, document storage etc
spricket 8y ago
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
- politelemon 8y ago
  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.
  - spricket 8y ago
    Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, before they cloned most of AWS). Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it. We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along. 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
I have never been a fan of IBM but if you like open stack for dev ops then their BlueBiz service is nice, with a very generous free tier. I have always favored GCP over AWS but Amazon does win in the customer support offered. It will be interesting to see if Google invests in non-automated human teams for sales and support.
- chaoticmass 8y ago
  BueBiz? Do you mean Blue Mix?
  - mark_l_watson 8y ago
    Yes, thanks
killjoywashere 8y ago
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.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  It seems very unlikely to me that google is not aware of this
ringaroll 8y ago
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.
mathattack 8y ago
They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google’s Customer perception problem is that it’s too hard to use. (Fear of the unknown) IBM’s is that people resent their history of broken promises and hype. (Fear of the known)
- ardy42 8y ago
  > They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google’s Customer perception problem is that it’s too hard to use. (Fear of the unknown) IBM’s is that people resent their history of broken promises and hype. (Fear of the known) Google has its share of broken promises around sudden product discontinuation, and account closures without recourse.
  - mathattack 8y ago
    Fair enough. And that spoons businesses. I think the larger perception on them is that the technology generally works, it’s the handholding that’s missing.
jacques_chester 8y ago
Desperate? I'm not sure. 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.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Yes, it's been posited right here on HN years ago that GCP could dwarf their existing ad business and that gets clearer by the day. However the vision and momentum just doesn't match the opportunity. It's especially strange that Amazon is now getting in the advertising business and is very quickly (in less than 2 years) posing a serious threat to some of Google's ad products.
businessaddress 8y ago
IBM's Softlayer offers various Cloud options as well. I don't know how do they fare against other major Clouds however. I don't know about Google Cloud services, but AWS use a very unethical business model which lacks transparency. Most of their clients aren't warned that they will end up paying a high data transfer fees on "Data Transfer Out". Our experience with Azure is a bit better, but they are still more expensive than any average cloud. Our company uses cloud infrastructure service with a smaller cloud - https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public-cloud.html https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public-cloud.html - and they are pretty good and inexpensive, compared to the major clouds, in terms of technology (VMware Cloud computing) and in terms of cloud storage.
stupidlogin 8y ago
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.
chiph 8y ago
Ginni Rometty was on Bloomberg the other day saying that Hybrid Clouds are a trillion dollar business and that IBM intends to be #1 in the market. https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-hybrid-171405544.html 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 8y ago
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.
crb002 8y ago
IBM needs mainframes collocated with cloud data centers if it wants to stay relevant. CA is legit in the CAP model, but you need sane latency to other systems.
hacknat 8y ago
Google is the only (major) cloud provider to suffer global service outages (AWS and Azure have only ever had region-wide outages). They have done so more than once, and they have no notable blog posts that ever explain how they will mitigate it in the future. That's enough from my perspective to never recommend them to any customer that ever needs region redundancy. From my experience of being a cloud middle man the only industries left that haven't already migrated to the cloud are the ones that have burdensome regulatory and compliance burdens. From that perspective MSFT is winning. They try the hardest to get all the qualifications, certs, and partners that make Medicine, Finance, and Auto feel safe. Are they the best cloud? Probably not, but they are poised to take what's left of those who haven't ventured into the cloud yet.
- kubabuba 8y ago
  What global outage do you mean ? I havent seen one for 1y of using it meanwhile office 365 just scored a global outage recently
parker55 8y ago
why they are not capable enough to move for that?
OhHeyItsE 8y ago
Lots of commenters here failing to recognize how much competition within consumer vertical plays here. For years AWS was the cloud, and the only viable option. At the same time that traditionally non-technical (or at least not tech-first) companies are coming around to the idea of moving to the cloud, there are alternatives for the first time ever. Amazon is now a major player in ecommerce, perishable/grocery and digital media content (both delivery and production). Companies in those verticals are hesitant to move to AWS, some are already outright refusing. This is where the opportunity for competitors lies. Edit: was mentioned, about 13 hours before I did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933
sam_goody 8y ago
The "S" In GCP stands for support. As a former App Engine user, steer clear of Google cloud. (And I am aware that Amazon also has what to improve in support.)
true_tuna 8y ago
Hey google. You want people to use your cloud? Fix your documentation. It’s abysmal. For example: 1) How do you use let’s encrypt with google kubernetes engine? 2) How do you securely store secrets? Pretend you don’t know and try to follow the documentation to figure it out. You can’t because the documentation isn’t geared towards solving specific problems. I have no idea what it IS geared towards, but it’s not that. You will never win if people can’t figure out how to do the things they need to do. Aws is arguably more expensive and in some ways less capable. But they will win simply because normal people can figure out how to do stuff.

166 points by deanmoriarty 8y ago

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.

sanxiyn 8y ago
In my circles a lot of non-Microsoft people talk about Azure.
- kerng 8y ago
  Yeah, same here. Microsoft seems to really change people's minds these days. Many of my friends disliked them, but now see them as a great option compared to AWS lock in. I think Azure has a strong offering, but that Portal UI, oh my...
  - discordance 8y ago
    Yeah the portal UI sucks. Anyone seriously using Azure is probably using az-cli, ARM templates, terraform etc.
fierro 8y ago
anecdata; I have never met a dev or a shop that uses Azure. Maybe the SF bay area is so heavily AWS/GCP that's all I hear about, but I have had the same experience as you
- oblio 8y ago
  The Bay Area is a bubble. A huge bubble, but still a bubble.

excalibur 8y ago

Related, seemingly contradictory: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch-vs-aws-we-wont-compete-with-you.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch...

airstrike 8y ago
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
partiallypro 8y ago
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.
- dsl 8y ago
  > Netflix is so melded with AWS. But it isn't. Netflix core service (video streaming) runs entirely on hardware they produce that runs in their own datacenters and embedded in ISPs. Billing, account management, video transcoding, etc. happen in AWS, but all that stuff can go down and customers don't get that upset.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    You haven’t seen Netflix’s AWS ReInvent talks.....
  - T2_t2 8y ago
    Video transcoding is particularly suited to the cloud. This sort if unpredictable load - new titles will pop up at odd intervals - is ideal for striking the balance between speed to market (you don't want to delay releasing new titles) and cost (having extra capacity for transcoding on the off chance you need it is expensive). Spool up hundreds of servers when they need to get a new title out, and buy them at cheapish rates is pretty much what the cloud was built for.

carlsborg 8y ago

Its incredibly hard to catch up. The following is a list of new major AWS functionality delivered just in the month of January: https://blog.clusterdyne.com/posts/new_aws_features_jan2019.html 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 8y ago
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.
- solotronics 8y ago
  is there any cloud thats "fully baked" in comparison to AWS?
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    No cloud provider is fully baked, that included AWS. Every single one of them has their own set of drawbacks.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I think it’s less of a cloud to cloud comparison, and more of a feature to feature comparison. Even AWS is half baked depending on the service (although the core services are rock solid, like S3, EC2, Cloudfront, and parts of RDS). Azure’s console has all sorts of intermittency/consistency issues, and they recently lost customer data due to how encrypted database data was inadvertently discarded due to a DNS failure scenario.

chid 8y ago

what about Oracle/Alibaba clouds?

jhwang5 8y ago
Fun fact: Aliyun (Alibaba cloud) has more revenue than GCP
- skc 8y ago
  So I just took a look at their offering and was shocked to see just how many services they offer. Way more than I had anticipated for a provider I don't really hear too much about.
- discordance 8y ago
  Love the Aliyun portal UI. By far the simplest and most accessible cloud portal UI when compared to AWS, Azure or GCP. Digital Ocean UI also awesome if you consider them a player in the field.
keypusher 8y ago
Oracle is not even in contention. Not only do they lack the expertise, they have a terrible reputation and offer nothing unique. Alibaba is a different story. China is a huge market that western companies typically stuggle in, and many of the large businesses there do not have the infrastructure debt of older US companies. Alibaba has massive infrastructure, strong technical expertise and their cloud offering has been expanding rapidly, I would definitely watch out for them.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  Alibaba can definitely take a huge chunk of the Chinese market - but internationally? They're Chinese. General opinion in Western politics is to distrust Chinese-controlled stuff, as evidenced by the handling of the Huawei case.
  - nradov 8y ago

airstrike 8y ago

> 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.

timClicks 8y ago
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.
- dsl 8y ago
  Joyent's failure was chasing the latest agile, devops, micro kernel, etc. hotness that was taking off in the valley. They completely ignored the fact that the big companies with huge budgets are full of people who don't give a shit about SmartOS resource grids and just want easy and similar enough to what they already know/run. People tried to label Amazon Lightsail as a "DigitalOcean killer", it was really a way to lower the bar of intimidation for the IT guys at paper mills and car seat factories.
CBLT 8y ago
My anecdata is that Microsoft used salespeople to talk to executives and give them a deal on Azure so good they couldn't pass it up.

latch 8y ago

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.

toast0 8y ago
As a customer of Softlayer, I haven't noticed very much from the acquisition. Support has gotten a bit worse, but our account has also gotten smaller, so I'm not sure if we were getting special treatment before. I still think the old portal was faster, and login via IBMid is dumb, but the servers still work, the network still pretty much works, and it feels like their networking monitoring got somewhat better. Their pricing got kind of weird though. And they expanded their locations significantly. We're leaving Softlayer, but to an acquirer's infrastructure, not to Amazon.
- latch 8y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that it got worse for existing customers. But I feel like by killing the Softlayer brand (softlayer.com is just a landing page where everything redirect to IBM cloud) and making "cloud" the focus, they're missing out on new business (including winning back people to baremetal who are tired of AWS' poor price/performance). Maybe they still are and I'm just not paying enough attention, but Softlayer was essentially the _top_ choice for dedicated hosting for the large number of customers that wanted something more reliable than OVH without having to go to Rackspace. I feel like they just walked about from that. Or, more to my point, that they're neglecting driving business to it to a point where it's actually helping AWS grow.
fierro 8y ago
"cloud isn't the big market" sorry lost me there
- dragandj 8y ago

Analemma_ 8y ago

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.

keypusher 8y ago
At startups and even medium sized tech companies, these decisions are often driven by engineering/ops teams and not by executives. I was on a team trying to decide between staying with AWS and moving to GCP about a year ago, at a company that spends well over $1M/year on infrastructure. The fact that Google has a track record of abandoning products with active users and has repeatedly shown they do not know how to deal with customers was absolutely part of the reason we decided to stay with AWS. I respect the engineering at Google immensely, and I would be willing to reconsider in a few years, but they need to prove their commitment first. They literally just killed another product today (Android Things)!
- ernsheong 8y ago
  Looks like GCP needs to sorely address this (mis)perception, and ensure their commitments to GCP is separate from the consumer business. But really, GCP is not the same as the consumer-facing products. GCP already has a lot of clout, and literally nothing I know in GCP has been deprecated/chopped just like that. GCP already has a huge following in its own right and it's very unlikely for GCP stuff to be axed, given how careful they are with implementing new features (I have interacted with numerous engineers, and often feature requests are taken with a lot of valid pushback to prevent feature creep).
  - 8y ago

aboutruby 8y ago

From a user point of view I much prefer AWS than Google Cloud (and I got used to the AWS names). Also as AWS is what basically everyone used, all the tooling is built mainly around it and sometimes support Google Cloud but it's not very well tested / supported. All that steams basically from being the leader by a vast margin.

ernsheong 8y ago
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is much simpler from a developer standpoint. AWS might have 20 tools to solve 20 problems, GCP has 5 tools to solve 20 problems (that's my observation). The tools provided by GCP itself will help you get the job done. AWS never really clicked for me, terrible UI/UX, too many steps to get things done. GCP is the opposite when it comes to ease of doing most things. When I started using GCP, I had a "wow" and "aha" moment: this is how a cloud should be. Give GCP a shot ;)
- takeda 8y ago
  I played with both, and I think in terms of what's easier is probably which one you used first, although I must admit that they are constantly adding new services, so perhaps for people that are starting now might get confusing to know which are the core services and which are just extra. They should simplify their console to list just core stuff, and put the other stuff on separate page. They have their own strengths and weaknesses. What jumped out to me is when I tried Google is I believe that Google has superior network infrastructure that lets them do some things that are hard to do in AWS, especially seamless integration of networking between regions, internal IPs also don't seem to be tied to individual zones etc. On the other hand, some services are just awful. I tried Deployment Manager, and while looks like it is a nice design that makes it more powerful than Cloud Formation, it is still buggy. Seeing that I'm now not surprised that terraform is so popular. I don't think it is that much better compared to CF, but if you use DM you must be a masochist.
jhwang5 8y ago
What people don't get is that all AWS services work seamlessly with each other. There's no use major use case that AWS don't provide a solve for. If you already use EC2 and S3, then it's obviously lower hurdle to also use RDS, Dynamo, etc. Then before you know it, you are using Lambda, ECS, etc. To sum it up, anyone who says GCP is easier to use than AWS don't understand the power of having the most feature-rich ecosystem.

shereadsthenews 8y ago

Alternative interpretation: Google's Cloud is ridiculously large, but they occupy 99% of it with their own product.

ummonk 8y ago

Wait. AWS only has 32% market share? That is way less than I would have guessed.

cobookman 8y ago
32% of `cloud` marketshare. Cloud includes things like Salesforce's SaaS, Oracle DB in the cloud, Office 365, gSuite, ...etc. I'm sure if you look at Compute, Storage, and Networking cloud spend, AWS has a much higher marketshare.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Okay yeah, that makes sense.

duxup 8y ago

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".

mark-r 8y ago

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?

ernsheong 8y ago
You can go to https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers and open a ticket at the respective product issue tracker. To get more hand-holding support, it's the same as AWS, i.e. you pay for it: https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/
- rexarex 8y ago
  Hostile answer further discredits google support
  - ernsheong 8y ago
    How is this answer hostile?
- mark-r 8y ago
  It would be interesting to hear some contrasting reports from people who have actually needed support.

sandGorgon 8y ago

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.

ernsheong 8y ago
You can go to https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers and open a ticket at the respective product public issue tracker without a paid support plan.
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  These are issue trackers. I'm not reporting a bug in Google. I want support on "how to do X" or "I purchased this reserved instance by accident, can I get a refund".
  - ernsheong 8y ago
    Fair enough. For questions, Stack Overflow is what they usually point to. Sometimes GCP staff logs on and answers, otherwise the community. For the refund scenario, I found this: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues You can also vent in their feedback widget within Console. To my surprise the product managers actually read it, and sometimes respond back for more information. There's also a UserVoice forum to voice out feature requests for each product: https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-google-cloud-platform https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-goog...

Brahma111 8y ago

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.

avip 8y ago
Let me guess: "the tier that we were in" was the free tier?
- dragandj 8y ago
  May be so, but Google made sure that "the tier they were in" stays "nothing by Google, ever" for that particular company.
- jussij 8y ago
  And it may well be that "the tier that we were in" was the free tier. But my question would be why did Google enter a paying field with a free option, knowing full well it would kill off all those paying players, to only then kill their free option knowing all competition is now gone? Google should not be offering up any service, free or otherwise that has a use by date that is only known to Google.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
asciimike 8y ago
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.

pm90 8y ago

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).

oblio 8y ago
> They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people. There's been plenty of projects filled with very smart people that have failed.
- pm90 8y ago
  I think my comment mentioned a lot of reasons why they might succeed and not just because they're staffed with smart people. Cherry-picking a statement like this really adds no value to the discussion.

kerng 8y ago

I'm not sure if hiring an Oracle person will change much here. GCP lacks with features and is so focused on Kubernetes alone. Biggest issue with Google is support and lack of diverse options. I have never used IBM, so can't comment on their experience - but IBM always had good sales and consulting teams. Maybe both should team up?

keerthiko 8y ago

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.

withdavidli 8y ago
They did this when I first moved to the valley in 2013. Found them sponsoring hackathons and giving away GCP at 10k-50k free first year for just participating, prizes for winning hackathon was, I believe, actual cash plus 50k+ more GCP. But not sure if they kept up the sponsorships.
avip 8y ago
Anecdotally, I spoke with both gcp and aws reps in previous startup (not in US), and both told me the "take free 500K in credits" party is over. YMMV
- boulos 8y ago
  Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I don't think we ever offered $500k, but have consistently done $100k for up to a year. There were definitely lots of startups that would chase credits across us, AWS and Azure (who at least at one point would do $300k). While I think it's great to ride free credits while you can, it's probably a mistake if your company is changing infrastructure each year in search of free dollars. And even worse if you do so at a huge hit to your productivity and ultimate product success.

vfc1 8y ago

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.

discordance 8y ago
If all you're doing is building web apps then that sounds pretty good. Pretty certain any large enterprise cloud workload that gcp/azure/AWS is interested in is a lot more than that. Data warehousing, Kafka stuff, identity management, document storage etc

spricket 8y ago

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

politelemon 8y ago
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.
- spricket 8y ago
  Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, before they cloned most of AWS). Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it. We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along. 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.

mark_l_watson 8y ago

I have never been a fan of IBM but if you like open stack for dev ops then their BlueBiz service is nice, with a very generous free tier. I have always favored GCP over AWS but Amazon does win in the customer support offered. It will be interesting to see if Google invests in non-automated human teams for sales and support.

chaoticmass 8y ago
BueBiz? Do you mean Blue Mix?
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  Yes, thanks

killjoywashere 8y ago

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.

b_tterc_p 8y ago
It seems very unlikely to me that google is not aware of this

ringaroll 8y ago

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.

mathattack 8y ago

They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google’s Customer perception problem is that it’s too hard to use. (Fear of the unknown) IBM’s is that people resent their history of broken promises and hype. (Fear of the known)

ardy42 8y ago
> They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google’s Customer perception problem is that it’s too hard to use. (Fear of the unknown) IBM’s is that people resent their history of broken promises and hype. (Fear of the known) Google has its share of broken promises around sudden product discontinuation, and account closures without recourse.
- mathattack 8y ago
  Fair enough. And that spoons businesses. I think the larger perception on them is that the technology generally works, it’s the handholding that’s missing.

jacques_chester 8y ago

Desperate? I'm not sure. 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.

manigandham 8y ago
Yes, it's been posited right here on HN years ago that GCP could dwarf their existing ad business and that gets clearer by the day. However the vision and momentum just doesn't match the opportunity. It's especially strange that Amazon is now getting in the advertising business and is very quickly (in less than 2 years) posing a serious threat to some of Google's ad products.

businessaddress 8y ago

IBM's Softlayer offers various Cloud options as well. I don't know how do they fare against other major Clouds however. I don't know about Google Cloud services, but AWS use a very unethical business model which lacks transparency. Most of their clients aren't warned that they will end up paying a high data transfer fees on "Data Transfer Out". Our experience with Azure is a bit better, but they are still more expensive than any average cloud. Our company uses cloud infrastructure service with a smaller cloud - https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public-cloud.html https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public-cloud.html - and they are pretty good and inexpensive, compared to the major clouds, in terms of technology (VMware Cloud computing) and in terms of cloud storage.

stupidlogin 8y ago

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.

chiph 8y ago

Ginni Rometty was on Bloomberg the other day saying that Hybrid Clouds are a trillion dollar business and that IBM intends to be #1 in the market. https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-hybrid-171405544.html 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 8y ago

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.

crb002 8y ago

IBM needs mainframes collocated with cloud data centers if it wants to stay relevant. CA is legit in the CAP model, but you need sane latency to other systems.

hacknat 8y ago

Google is the only (major) cloud provider to suffer global service outages (AWS and Azure have only ever had region-wide outages). They have done so more than once, and they have no notable blog posts that ever explain how they will mitigate it in the future. That's enough from my perspective to never recommend them to any customer that ever needs region redundancy. From my experience of being a cloud middle man the only industries left that haven't already migrated to the cloud are the ones that have burdensome regulatory and compliance burdens. From that perspective MSFT is winning. They try the hardest to get all the qualifications, certs, and partners that make Medicine, Finance, and Auto feel safe. Are they the best cloud? Probably not, but they are poised to take what's left of those who haven't ventured into the cloud yet.

kubabuba 8y ago
What global outage do you mean ? I havent seen one for 1y of using it meanwhile office 365 just scored a global outage recently

parker55 8y ago

why they are not capable enough to move for that?

OhHeyItsE 8y ago

Lots of commenters here failing to recognize how much competition within consumer vertical plays here. For years AWS was the cloud, and the only viable option. At the same time that traditionally non-technical (or at least not tech-first) companies are coming around to the idea of moving to the cloud, there are alternatives for the first time ever. Amazon is now a major player in ecommerce, perishable/grocery and digital media content (both delivery and production). Companies in those verticals are hesitant to move to AWS, some are already outright refusing. This is where the opportunity for competitors lies. Edit: was mentioned, about 13 hours before I did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933

sam_goody 8y ago

The "S" In GCP stands for support. As a former App Engine user, steer clear of Google cloud. (And I am aware that Amazon also has what to improve in support.)

true_tuna 8y ago

Hey google. You want people to use your cloud? Fix your documentation. It’s abysmal. For example: 1) How do you use let’s encrypt with google kubernetes engine? 2) How do you securely store secrets? Pretend you don’t know and try to follow the documentation to figure it out. You can’t because the documentation isn’t geared towards solving specific problems. I have no idea what it IS geared towards, but it’s not that. You will never win if people can’t figure out how to do the things they need to do. Aws is arguably more expensive and in some ways less capable. But they will win simply because normal people can figure out how to do stuff.