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They've tried to entice technologists so far and it's put them in dead last, by far, versus AWS and Azure. From a business point of view shifting away from tech

They've tried to entice technologists so far and it's put them in dead last, by far, versus AWS and Azure. From a business point of view shifting away from technologists to enterprise may be what they need to survive. If nothing else, technologists often don't have much control over the budget versus business leaders.

aaomidi 8y ago
Like increase the google maps api by 10x? Why would I recommend google to anyone when there is no stability in their platform?
- pradn 8y ago
  Sudden changes don't happen when enterprise contracts go years into the future. Google has a much better track record with keeping things stable in the enterprise-cloud world.
- antonvs 8y ago
  Google Maps and Google Cloud are essentially unrelated businesses, with entirely different business models and strategies. Lumping them all together because they share the name "Google" doesn't make sense.
  - aaomidi 8y ago
    Except Google maps was a Google cloud offering.
    - antonvs 8y ago
      I stand corrected. What I was getting at, though, is that if you're a big user of GCloud IaaS products and some of their more basic infrastructual SaaS offerings (Cloud SQL, Bigtable, etc. etc.) you're unlikely to run into the kind of issue you mentioned, and everything from the pricing to the way customer relationships are handled reflects that. Google Maps is basically an application as a service, which, while technically all part of "cloud", is not really part of the core cloud offering in the same way. On the Cloud Console, Google Maps is listed in the menu at the very bottom, as the only entry under "Other Google Solutions". All the cloud providers have a mix of offerings that range from very standard (IaaS, or managed open source systems like Cloud SQL and AWS RDS) to very proprietary (things like BigQuery, DynamoDB.) If you decide to use one of the very proprietary ones, you have to recognize that you're creating a very different kind of dependency and risk - migrating to another provider or hosting onprem becomes a rewrite, instead of a migration. That's a risk you should ideally be aware of before you choose such a solution, and it's not unique to Google. That same level of risk doesn't exist for the other kinds of products I've mentioned, so it doesn't make sense to treat that risk as though it applies to all Google products.
Someone1234 8y ago
> If nothing else, technologists often don't have much control over the budget versus business leaders. The business sets the budget and the requirements, but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people. There's definitely a lag between technical people getting interested in something and that thing getting big in enterprise, but there's still a correlation. Just as there's a inverse when everyone in tech hates a thing and a few years later businesses stop adopting it (see Oracle's slow decline, particularly for new customers).
- jedberg 8y ago
  > but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people. Have you ever worked at a large enterprise? That's almost never how it goes. An executive has a meal with a sales person, who says their technology will solve all of the executive's problems, then the executive signs up for a paid trial, and then tells the people that report to them that they are going to implement the thing. Some better enterprises will cut it off at that point after the technologists come back and say the trial didn't work out, but many enterprises will simply plow forward, either falling to the sunk cost fallacy, or because the executive's friend at another company told them it worked well at the other company.
  - plorkyeran 8y ago
    Even in the companies where they do actually care how the trial works out it's usually just "did it work?" and not "is this a good idea?". Often the expensive enterprise product can be made to work with a great deal of effort, and that's good enough to go forward.
  - bartimus 8y ago
    This is exactly the thing that frustrates me as an agile developer. The enterprise world is more about the position game than it is about the art of creating value. I'm obviously biased. But I think it's a toxic problem and was very much hoping new style businesses like Google are forcing big enterprises to reinvent themselves.
  - 8y ago
rapsey 8y ago
They have zero chance of competing with either aws or azure for the enterprise. It goes against their culture entirely. Unfortunately for them they also burned way too many bridges with technologists as well.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  This doesn't make sense to me. I don't get the allure of AWS, but Azure definitely knows how to hook into Enterprise infrastructure. I don't know what GCP "doesn't have" for the Enterprise.
  - rapsey 8y ago
    Sales, support, history of stability in terms of business and pricing, existing relationships, general accessibility and transparency in terms of plans for the future. They lack absolutely everything that makes a successful enterprise company.
  - notyourday 8y ago
    > I don't know what GCP "doesn't have" for the Enterprise. Customer service. All the way to the CEO/CTO level, where in event a named customer has a problem and fuming at something, the execs show up at customer's site in person to butter the relationship. Never underestimate how important it is to have a high up person with authority to reassign priorities at a vendor do the executive customer service in order to keep and grow enterprise side healthy.
ForHackernews 8y ago
> what they need to survive As if Google is teetering on the brink? Or are you suggesting they'll just pull the plug on GCS? They very well might. Which, in fact, is probably half the reason companies won't buy what they're selling.

aaomidi 8y ago

Like increase the google maps api by 10x? Why would I recommend google to anyone when there is no stability in their platform?

pradn 8y ago
Sudden changes don't happen when enterprise contracts go years into the future. Google has a much better track record with keeping things stable in the enterprise-cloud world.
antonvs 8y ago
Google Maps and Google Cloud are essentially unrelated businesses, with entirely different business models and strategies. Lumping them all together because they share the name "Google" doesn't make sense.
- aaomidi 8y ago
  Except Google maps was a Google cloud offering.
  - antonvs 8y ago
    I stand corrected. What I was getting at, though, is that if you're a big user of GCloud IaaS products and some of their more basic infrastructual SaaS offerings (Cloud SQL, Bigtable, etc. etc.) you're unlikely to run into the kind of issue you mentioned, and everything from the pricing to the way customer relationships are handled reflects that. Google Maps is basically an application as a service, which, while technically all part of "cloud", is not really part of the core cloud offering in the same way. On the Cloud Console, Google Maps is listed in the menu at the very bottom, as the only entry under "Other Google Solutions". All the cloud providers have a mix of offerings that range from very standard (IaaS, or managed open source systems like Cloud SQL and AWS RDS) to very proprietary (things like BigQuery, DynamoDB.) If you decide to use one of the very proprietary ones, you have to recognize that you're creating a very different kind of dependency and risk - migrating to another provider or hosting onprem becomes a rewrite, instead of a migration. That's a risk you should ideally be aware of before you choose such a solution, and it's not unique to Google. That same level of risk doesn't exist for the other kinds of products I've mentioned, so it doesn't make sense to treat that risk as though it applies to all Google products.

Someone1234 8y ago

> If nothing else, technologists often don't have much control over the budget versus business leaders. The business sets the budget and the requirements, but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people. There's definitely a lag between technical people getting interested in something and that thing getting big in enterprise, but there's still a correlation. Just as there's a inverse when everyone in tech hates a thing and a few years later businesses stop adopting it (see Oracle's slow decline, particularly for new customers).

jedberg 8y ago
> but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people. Have you ever worked at a large enterprise? That's almost never how it goes. An executive has a meal with a sales person, who says their technology will solve all of the executive's problems, then the executive signs up for a paid trial, and then tells the people that report to them that they are going to implement the thing. Some better enterprises will cut it off at that point after the technologists come back and say the trial didn't work out, but many enterprises will simply plow forward, either falling to the sunk cost fallacy, or because the executive's friend at another company told them it worked well at the other company.
- plorkyeran 8y ago
  Even in the companies where they do actually care how the trial works out it's usually just "did it work?" and not "is this a good idea?". Often the expensive enterprise product can be made to work with a great deal of effort, and that's good enough to go forward.
- bartimus 8y ago
  This is exactly the thing that frustrates me as an agile developer. The enterprise world is more about the position game than it is about the art of creating value. I'm obviously biased. But I think it's a toxic problem and was very much hoping new style businesses like Google are forcing big enterprises to reinvent themselves.
- 8y ago

rapsey 8y ago

They have zero chance of competing with either aws or azure for the enterprise. It goes against their culture entirely. Unfortunately for them they also burned way too many bridges with technologists as well.

unethical_ban 8y ago
This doesn't make sense to me. I don't get the allure of AWS, but Azure definitely knows how to hook into Enterprise infrastructure. I don't know what GCP "doesn't have" for the Enterprise.
- rapsey 8y ago
  Sales, support, history of stability in terms of business and pricing, existing relationships, general accessibility and transparency in terms of plans for the future. They lack absolutely everything that makes a successful enterprise company.
- notyourday 8y ago
  > I don't know what GCP "doesn't have" for the Enterprise. Customer service. All the way to the CEO/CTO level, where in event a named customer has a problem and fuming at something, the execs show up at customer's site in person to butter the relationship. Never underestimate how important it is to have a high up person with authority to reassign priorities at a vendor do the executive customer service in order to keep and grow enterprise side healthy.

ForHackernews 8y ago

> what they need to survive As if Google is teetering on the brink? Or are you suggesting they'll just pull the plug on GCS? They very well might. Which, in fact, is probably half the reason companies won't buy what they're selling.