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It sounds like he's mostly taking the "good bits" – scaling the sales teams to be closer to those of competitors, and making the product offering more compellin

It sounds like he's mostly taking the "good bits" – scaling the sales teams to be closer to those of competitors, and making the product offering more compelling for enterprise customers. As a Google Cloud customer, I really hope that he doesn't take the "bad bits" – raising prices, unnecessary lock-in, slow moving technology, litigation. As an engineer in a team where engineers lead decisions like which cloud provider to use, rather than some exec on the golf course, I hope they keep their appeal to those customers who don't want to play the enterprise sales game.

0003 8y ago
I think Google is already caught up to Oracle in the lack of technical and customer support area.
- danpalmer 8y ago
  From what I understand, we have generally had a positive experience with technical support from Google.
  - qaq 8y ago
    I think all statements about support need to be clarified with $ monthly spend.
    - danpalmer 8y ago
      I can't confirm that, they are providing good support as a sales tactic, rather than because of our spend. To clarify: I don't have first-hand experience with their support, but I've heard from colleagues that it's been fine.
      - qaq 8y ago
        Same here but based on AWS experience going from 50k a year place to many millions per month of AWS spend resulted in very drastic change in support level and access to senior tech people when needed. I would imagine someone who really moves the needle like Netflix gets unprecedented level of access.
      - Jasper_ 8y ago
        I've had awful support. They reached out to me after I had an issue two months ago and CC'd 6 engineers but then stopped responding to my emails when it time to actually schedule time to "discuss my architecture". I tweeted about this, @GoogleCloud responded instantly, promised they would poke their support people. That was a week ago and I have heard nothing since. I've sent three follow-up emails.
  - calabin 8y ago
    In my experience, their documentation of the AdWords API has been consistently bad.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    At eight figures a year, support has been outstanding.
hammock 8y ago
Can you elaborate on what it takes to "make the product offering more compelling for enterprise customers"? Is it a marketing exercise?
- idunno246 8y ago
  No. Their enterprise support is not great, they happily leave bugs in production unless you complain loud enough, their user management and security policies don’t really scale to large orgs. It’s really not a great experience as an enterprise compared to other clouds, they don’t seem to really care about you
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    > their user management and security policies don’t really scale to large orgs Really? This is interesting. I am not working in a large org, but all of the issues we've had with their user management have essentially come down to it being designed for companies much larger than we are, with much more complex security requirements. Can you elaborate on what doesn't scale? What sort of requirements are they not meeting? Is it _targeting_ large orgs and getting it wrong, or is it targeting too-small orgs in your opinion?
    - idunno246 8y ago
      just a couple examples: the default service account is a project editor, which is insanely over-privileged, yet everything tries to use it, and all the demos. Appengine only supports one service account for all apps, even if you have multiple apps, also Editor. similar things in gke. Their pre-defined roles are a mess, and not consistent across services. Theres a role called 'dataflow admin' defined as the 'minimal permissions to run a job' which isn't what id call admin. So if you try to use custom roles instead, cause the predefined roles are crazy, they will make breaking changes to permissions(literally did this last week with no notice). Support access doesnt use IAM and only supports users, not groups, and no api - you have to go to a web form and add each user individually. good luck if you have more than a couple users, and have fun trying to keep that in sync. The fact that its tied to gsuite is a problem as well, a gsuite admin is also a gcp admin, which is generally owned by different orgs(IT vs dev). it seems like every month we have a new breaking change, or price change(maps is biting us constantly for some reason) ultimately what it comes down to is weve been burned enough that we dont trust google
asdf333 8y ago
ah yes. actually in oracles playbook that comes later. after you have a stranglehold on the market.

0003 8y ago

I think Google is already caught up to Oracle in the lack of technical and customer support area.

danpalmer 8y ago
From what I understand, we have generally had a positive experience with technical support from Google.
- qaq 8y ago
  I think all statements about support need to be clarified with $ monthly spend.
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    I can't confirm that, they are providing good support as a sales tactic, rather than because of our spend. To clarify: I don't have first-hand experience with their support, but I've heard from colleagues that it's been fine.
    - qaq 8y ago
      Same here but based on AWS experience going from 50k a year place to many millions per month of AWS spend resulted in very drastic change in support level and access to senior tech people when needed. I would imagine someone who really moves the needle like Netflix gets unprecedented level of access.
    - Jasper_ 8y ago
      I've had awful support. They reached out to me after I had an issue two months ago and CC'd 6 engineers but then stopped responding to my emails when it time to actually schedule time to "discuss my architecture". I tweeted about this, @GoogleCloud responded instantly, promised they would poke their support people. That was a week ago and I have heard nothing since. I've sent three follow-up emails.
- calabin 8y ago
  In my experience, their documentation of the AdWords API has been consistently bad.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  At eight figures a year, support has been outstanding.

hammock 8y ago

Can you elaborate on what it takes to "make the product offering more compelling for enterprise customers"? Is it a marketing exercise?

idunno246 8y ago
No. Their enterprise support is not great, they happily leave bugs in production unless you complain loud enough, their user management and security policies don’t really scale to large orgs. It’s really not a great experience as an enterprise compared to other clouds, they don’t seem to really care about you
- danpalmer 8y ago
  > their user management and security policies don’t really scale to large orgs Really? This is interesting. I am not working in a large org, but all of the issues we've had with their user management have essentially come down to it being designed for companies much larger than we are, with much more complex security requirements. Can you elaborate on what doesn't scale? What sort of requirements are they not meeting? Is it _targeting_ large orgs and getting it wrong, or is it targeting too-small orgs in your opinion?
  - idunno246 8y ago
    just a couple examples: the default service account is a project editor, which is insanely over-privileged, yet everything tries to use it, and all the demos. Appengine only supports one service account for all apps, even if you have multiple apps, also Editor. similar things in gke. Their pre-defined roles are a mess, and not consistent across services. Theres a role called 'dataflow admin' defined as the 'minimal permissions to run a job' which isn't what id call admin. So if you try to use custom roles instead, cause the predefined roles are crazy, they will make breaking changes to permissions(literally did this last week with no notice). Support access doesnt use IAM and only supports users, not groups, and no api - you have to go to a web form and add each user individually. good luck if you have more than a couple users, and have fun trying to keep that in sync. The fact that its tied to gsuite is a problem as well, a gsuite admin is also a gcp admin, which is generally owned by different orgs(IT vs dev). it seems like every month we have a new breaking change, or price change(maps is biting us constantly for some reason) ultimately what it comes down to is weve been burned enough that we dont trust google

asdf333 8y ago

ah yes. actually in oracles playbook that comes later. after you have a stranglehold on the market.