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Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. That's the simplest reason. Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten

by lacker 7y ago

Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. That's the simplest reason. Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great representation.

nemothekid 7y ago
> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years. However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact that Google invented cloud computing. Even Apple is weaning off its iPhone revenue with its fast growing services division.
- GauntletWizard 7y ago
  I see this meme all the time. What does GCP lag on? What is it missing? I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads and writes with clear translation when necessary. I find myself reaching for Bigquery like semantics all the time and having to cobble two or more AWS tools to get similar. I see the same pattern repeated constantly - If I click "ECS" in the Amazon Console, it wants to sell me ECS, ECR, Fargate, and EKS - All of which overlap in non-obvious ways. Disclaimer: I'm Ex-google, and was a poweruser of dremel
  - hosh 7y ago
    I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to move off to GCP. AWS gave a generous credit to the type of startup we have, and with the relationship-building from the solutions architect and account manager, this probably won't go away. There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers. I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't. If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP. I have never worked for Google or Amazon.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too. Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making. AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.
  - gwking 7y ago
    My understanding is that GCP lags on developer trust, specifically when it comes to support. Several years ago I was excited about GCP, but have mostly lost interest after reading various stories about account lockouts here on HN.
    - cwp 7y ago
      This. Unless you are a big, important account, do not put anything you value on any of Google's platforms. There is a small, but non-zero, chance they'll randomly destroy it and ghost you.
    - nanoservices 7y ago
      This is accurate form my perspective. I work for a company that made a big bet on Google Cloud and we spent the last 4 years building on it. We are now moving to Azure because of the number of times Google kept dropping support for things forcing us to rewrite our libraries. We should have never went with PaaS (App Engine) but thats a different issue all together. App Engine Flex was a nightmare to work with because Google couldn't help themselves with the constant urge to change things by ripping out things and replacing them instead of having a vision and improving on the existing offerings.
  - mark_l_watson 7y ago
    I think that GCP is obviously better for people working inside Google. I was amazed when on my third day I took the all day end to end class and was blown away by how “not difficult” it was to use Borg, the global file system, web based dev tools, etc. But, I have always enjoyed using public GCP more that AWS.
  - Jasper_ 7y ago
    I was a user of GCP. Documentation lied to me back in January and cost me over $1000 of my personal money. I got assigned a support case, and had absolutely no reply until April, when I had confirmation that there was indeed a bug in the system from Google engineers, and that they planned to fix it. In the meantime, I switched off of GCP. Their only consolation was a coupon that insisted that I keep on using GCP, which would have eaten through my money again. I somehow got CC'd to an internal Google system, Buganizer, which has done nothing but leak a bunch of internal communications, including some small code patches to GCP infrastructure itself. My support request has not been updated, but Buganizer has let me know that they supposedly updated the documentation mid-November to fix it, but the rephrased advice still was not correct based on my interpretation of the issue. The bug is still open.
whateveracct 7y ago
Attributing that growth to a single CEO is a little silly as a default.
enitihas 7y ago
But hadn't it grown more in the preceding 5 years than in the 4 years headed by Sundar. Looking at the share price, it seems it has roughly doubled every 5 years since 2005.
goatinaboat 7y ago
Correlation is not causation.
ohazi 7y ago
> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. Microsoft grew similarly under Ballmer, despite losing a lot of their strategic advantages and missing the boat in a handful of important ways.
- m0zg 7y ago
  I can name only one: mobile. OTOH Ballmer spearheaded Azure and Office/Exchange as a service, both of which are the major reasons why MS is a trillion-dollar company on an upswing today. No amount of Satya would save it, if Ballmer didn't beat the internal Microsoft "deep state" into submission on Azure and SaaS first. And a serious beatdown was required before Office and Windows apparatchiks received the message.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Ballmer tried to save Microsoft by killing the Internet, creating the opening for Google to become the industry leader
    - m0zg 7y ago
      I think you're confusing him with Gates. Although Ballmer did refuse to buy Google when he could. Would have been a drop in the bucket. I forgot, BTW, he also spun up the ad and search businesses: the only reason there's any alternative to Google at all.
      - ddalex 7y ago
        Arguably, if he would've bought Google, we wouldn't have the internet as we have it today: people would've payed for search, as for the OS and Office suite: $10 per 1000 queries per month. Hmmm, maybe that've been for the better.
        m0zg 7y ago
        There'd be a heck of a lot fewer ads for sure.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Doubling their market share is big. I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good. In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.

by lacker 7y ago

nemothekid 7y ago

> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years. However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact that Google invented cloud computing. Even Apple is weaning off its iPhone revenue with its fast growing services division.

GauntletWizard 7y ago
I see this meme all the time. What does GCP lag on? What is it missing? I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads and writes with clear translation when necessary. I find myself reaching for Bigquery like semantics all the time and having to cobble two or more AWS tools to get similar. I see the same pattern repeated constantly - If I click "ECS" in the Amazon Console, it wants to sell me ECS, ECR, Fargate, and EKS - All of which overlap in non-obvious ways. Disclaimer: I'm Ex-google, and was a poweruser of dremel
- hosh 7y ago
  I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to move off to GCP. AWS gave a generous credit to the type of startup we have, and with the relationship-building from the solutions architect and account manager, this probably won't go away. There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers. I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't. If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP. I have never worked for Google or Amazon.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too. Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making. AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.
- gwking 7y ago
  My understanding is that GCP lags on developer trust, specifically when it comes to support. Several years ago I was excited about GCP, but have mostly lost interest after reading various stories about account lockouts here on HN.
  - cwp 7y ago
    This. Unless you are a big, important account, do not put anything you value on any of Google's platforms. There is a small, but non-zero, chance they'll randomly destroy it and ghost you.
  - nanoservices 7y ago
    This is accurate form my perspective. I work for a company that made a big bet on Google Cloud and we spent the last 4 years building on it. We are now moving to Azure because of the number of times Google kept dropping support for things forcing us to rewrite our libraries. We should have never went with PaaS (App Engine) but thats a different issue all together. App Engine Flex was a nightmare to work with because Google couldn't help themselves with the constant urge to change things by ripping out things and replacing them instead of having a vision and improving on the existing offerings.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I think that GCP is obviously better for people working inside Google. I was amazed when on my third day I took the all day end to end class and was blown away by how “not difficult” it was to use Borg, the global file system, web based dev tools, etc. But, I have always enjoyed using public GCP more that AWS.
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  I was a user of GCP. Documentation lied to me back in January and cost me over $1000 of my personal money. I got assigned a support case, and had absolutely no reply until April, when I had confirmation that there was indeed a bug in the system from Google engineers, and that they planned to fix it. In the meantime, I switched off of GCP. Their only consolation was a coupon that insisted that I keep on using GCP, which would have eaten through my money again. I somehow got CC'd to an internal Google system, Buganizer, which has done nothing but leak a bunch of internal communications, including some small code patches to GCP infrastructure itself. My support request has not been updated, but Buganizer has let me know that they supposedly updated the documentation mid-November to fix it, but the rephrased advice still was not correct based on my interpretation of the issue. The bug is still open.

whateveracct 7y ago

Attributing that growth to a single CEO is a little silly as a default.

enitihas 7y ago

But hadn't it grown more in the preceding 5 years than in the 4 years headed by Sundar. Looking at the share price, it seems it has roughly doubled every 5 years since 2005.

goatinaboat 7y ago

Correlation is not causation.

ohazi 7y ago

> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. Microsoft grew similarly under Ballmer, despite losing a lot of their strategic advantages and missing the boat in a handful of important ways.

m0zg 7y ago
I can name only one: mobile. OTOH Ballmer spearheaded Azure and Office/Exchange as a service, both of which are the major reasons why MS is a trillion-dollar company on an upswing today. No amount of Satya would save it, if Ballmer didn't beat the internal Microsoft "deep state" into submission on Azure and SaaS first. And a serious beatdown was required before Office and Windows apparatchiks received the message.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Ballmer tried to save Microsoft by killing the Internet, creating the opening for Google to become the industry leader
  - m0zg 7y ago
    I think you're confusing him with Gates. Although Ballmer did refuse to buy Google when he could. Would have been a drop in the bucket. I forgot, BTW, he also spun up the ad and search businesses: the only reason there's any alternative to Google at all.
    - ddalex 7y ago
      Arguably, if he would've bought Google, we wouldn't have the internet as we have it today: people would've payed for search, as for the OS and Office suite: $10 per 1000 queries per month. Hmmm, maybe that've been for the better.
      - m0zg 7y ago
        There'd be a heck of a lot fewer ads for sure.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Doubling their market share is big. I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good. In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.