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Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

• ilovecaching 7y ago
  It's crazy what Google is willing to kill. I mean if GCloud gets shut down, what hope is there for Stadia?
  • xvector 7y ago
    There isn’t. Anyone who bought Stadia either doesn’t care about losing their purchases or is deluding themselves.
• scarface74 7y ago
  The clock is ticking for Google Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy. When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings. On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering. Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.
  • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Almost seems like it would have people looking for the eject button.
    • zerothOffset 7y ago
      Man my firm was looking into going ahead GCP and now this
      • arthurcolle 7y ago
        Aren't you feeling lucky that they are doing all your due diligence work for you? I wish my decisions were this easy!
      • faizshah 7y ago
        Its kind of ridiculous that this is the moment in time they decided to pull the plug. It feels like they leaked this to ensure they could get out of cloud by 2024. GCP cloud skills/certs have just started becoming marketable. Only recently has GCP become something you can seriously suggest to managers and point to BigQuery, Stack driver, firebase and cloud run as reasons to switch. Cloud Run, dialogflow, bigquery and kubernetes engine are literally at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going and Cloud Dataflow is seeing adoption among lots of companies tired of running their own clusters. It really seems like they leaked this to ensure they couldnt compete with AWS and Azure so they can jump ship in 2023.
        • scarface74 7y ago
          And you’re kind of demonstrating why enterprises don’t take GCP seriously. How is their enterprise support? The decision makers would hear everything you say and you might as well be speaking Greek. The one CYA question they are going to ask is where does GCP fall on the Magic Quadrant? If things go wrong with GCP they will have to explain why they chose it.
          • faizshah 7y ago
            You wouldnt mention jaeger or istio either to decision makers. You would say we can cut operational costs and modernize big data infrastructure while making our data warehouse more accessible(BigQuery). We can save money when APIs arent being used (Cloud Run). We can process real time data without increasing operational costs (Cloud Dataflow). We can debug systems failures faster (Stackdriver). We can launch products and iterate faster with a lightweight frontend team (Firebase). We can build conversational interfaces rapidly (Dialogflow). You reword in terms of results rather than tools for decision makers. Of course this is all moot because you have to convince them google cloud wont shut down by 2023.
    • babesh 7y ago
      My impression is that that has already happened... at multiple levels in the company.
  • bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    >When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings. And that's when I talk about Google Enterprise Search.
    • victor9000 7y ago
      And the order of magnitude price increase of the maps API.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        I can’t verify it, but I’ve heard it repeated plenty of times that AWS has never raised the price of an offering.
• rogerkirkness 7y ago
  I would be soooo pissed if this happened. So much for marrying GCP. AWS and Azure are so much worse though. The price of good software is clearly very high.
• Asooka 7y ago
  The engineers from Amazon, Google and Microsoft should get together and make sure they're all using different metrics for success, so they can all be first at the same time. Or work out a schedule for who will be first which year.
• ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  The Information is a fantastic source, and I subscribed to support the excellent original reporting that comes out of it. Most of the news will get disseminated by other blogs and news journals in the next day or so, but The Information is pretty good if you want tech news first. A big nugget from behind the paywall: "This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said." The article also claims Google Cloud isn't profitable under their current business plan: "The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market."
  • raiyu 7y ago
    I signed up to the information for the same reason. Plus they actually have their paywall well designed. I get most of my news from them via email and I can read it right in my phone's gmail, versus everything else that has me sign up somewhere and then re-login every time. I wouldn't mind paying if the experience was at least seamless post payment.
    • zerothOffset 7y ago
      How much is the subscription? wonder if they have a student discount?
      • codyogden 7y ago
        They have a "under 30" plan. http://thein.fo/youngpros http://thein.fo/youngpros
        • clebio 7y ago
          Why in the world is this age-based?
• Despegar 7y ago
  I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw this headline on Twitter. It's just kisses fingers. So now that everyone knows they are waffling on whether to stay in the business (and have a deadline), Microsoft and Amazon just need to increase the competitive intensity for the next few years to drive Google out and instead of cloud computing being an oligopoly it'll be a duopoly. If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible, because the long-term future of this market is AWS and Azure being an extremely high margin duopoly with massive barriers to entry. You might see aggressive competition before 2023, but 10 years out it's not going to be that. The NYT wrote a piece a few days ago about certain startups considering antitrust complaints against AWS, and more of them should consider that [1]. The FTC is investigating AWS [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-ftc-antitrust-scrutiny-report-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-ft...
  • daveFNbuck 7y ago
    Microsoft and Amazon don't even need to do anything. Knowing that there might only be 3 years of service remaining, I definitely won't use Google Cloud and I'll tell everyone I know not to use it too.
    • basch 7y ago
      Microsoft Azure: The cloud service that wont abruptly close out of nowhere with no transition plan leaving you stranded, and a service that actually comes with that thing you call when you need help and support. The marketing writes itself.
      • Jasper_ 7y ago
        They already wrote that marketing 8 years ago. Only gets more and more true over the years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4
• googlebigdream 7y ago
  Point to remember- they are number 4. And beating a fast rising azure is going to be close to impossible.
  • nemothekid 7y ago
    Who's number 3? Who am I missing?
    • hwbehrens 7y ago
      Gartner ranked Aliyun as the third largest provider in 1Q19.
      • benburleson 7y ago
        As a fulltime web dev, I had a guess of who's cloud that was, but had to look the name up. They may have numbers due to Chinese usage, but no Western company is going to use Chinese hosting, ever.
      • johnbellone 7y ago
        Gartner isn't a source that I'd use as a basis for it (or honestly, anything). I would take a look at annual revenue for all of these businesses.
      • cnlwsu 7y ago
        Gartner ranks companies by how much they pay Gartner for "advisors"
    • cthalupa 7y ago
      Different articles and sources give different numbers, so don't take this as gospel, but: IBM's *-as-a-service ARR is larger than Google Cloud's. Oracle claims theirs is too, but my understanding is that they roll a lot of their licensing costs into the same reporting, so it's hard to tell for sure.
    • NathanKP 7y ago
      From what I have seen Alibaba cloud is #3. Don't forget that China is a huge market, and it is very hard for Western companies to be successful there. Alibaba has China government backing and that relationship is allowing them a lot of access in China
• umvi 7y ago
  If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I'm afraid something will go wrong and I won't be able to talk to a human. I've heard so many stories about the "stone wall" that is Google customer support. Also, I'm afraid the rug will get pulled out from under me if I decide to go all in given their history of axing projects that they don't want to support anymore.
  • jkeuhlen 7y ago
    The thing that scares me the most, is some automated system deciding that I did something wrong without telling me and banning not only my Google Cloud account but also all of my personal google accounts.
    • btown 7y ago
      Or, alternately, some automated system linking personal and work identities, a misunderstanding occurring on a personal side project of any of our developers (say, a misconfigured email send that's flagged as spammy, or someone's personal blog that's hacked and has malware uploaded)... and our entire startup going offline as a result. It's bad enough that we use G Suite and that's vulnerable to this. But a cloud lockout, with tooling built for a specific cloud, database restores required, etc. would be a whole different level of devastating. I almost have an obligation to shareholders to steer clear of them just because of that.
      • res0nat0r 7y ago
        GCP has the same support model as AWS. You don't get to enter cases with either free plan, your support is posting on forums and hoping for answers. If you want to pay then you have different levels of access to varying response times. The "Google has no support folks which can be reached" for GCP isn't applicable here. https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/
  • 7y ago
• joobus 7y ago
  The Google cemetery is calling... https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
  • codyogden 7y ago
    Now now... killedbygoogle.com
  • antisthenes 7y ago
    One day, Google itself will appear there and things will have come full circle.
• cek 7y ago
  Reminds me of Ray Noorda[1]. Nothing good ever happens when companies focus entirely on their competitors. If Google really wants to beat Amazon & Microsoft in "Cloud", they should focus entirely on the customer and the value they can provide that customer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Noorda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Noorda
  • ww520 7y ago
    History is repeating itself. Google+ was fixated on Facebook, and ...
  • kitsune_ 7y ago
    Focusing on the customer is the only thing a company should be doing, I'm astonished how often people seem to forget this.
  • bhl 7y ago
    From the Everything Store, “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else.”
  • Angostura 7y ago
    Noorda’s problem was that his product - a file server was swiftly turning into a commodity
    • cek 7y ago
      What about WordPerfect? Noorda's problem was he was completely, utterly, obsessed with his competition.
      • Angostura 7y ago
        I interviewed him a few times and I don't think that was strictly true. Perhaps near the end where Windows NT and OS/2 were taking chunks out of Netware
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• stopads 7y ago
  I made a joke years ago about how Google would shut down GCP on a whim, ending the last shred of goodwill they had in tech. Too absurd for reality.
  • Lutger 7y ago
    Did you miss that the complete headline is actually 'Google execs reportedly debated getting out of cloud computing, but instead set a goal of being a top-two player by 2023'? Or is it more the fact they considered it at all?
    • vbezhenar 7y ago
      "If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely."
  • downerending 7y ago
    I, for one, appreciate having several years' notice...
• mrosett 7y ago
  I can't imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that's already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when they'll abandon cloud. How could anyone in their right mind start building on GCP? They may as well shut it down today.
  • Jyaif 7y ago
    "That timeline was devised early last year, after an intense monthslong debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Information." Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.
    • mrosett 7y ago
      I think you underestimate how political Google has become internally.
      • dralley 7y ago
        The extent to which Google and Microsoft have switched places from where they were a decade ago is hilarious. https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000000-480-359.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000...
        • Qub3d 7y ago
          Hah, I love that comic. Here's the full one: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
          • tazjin 7y ago
            That comic, by the way, is one of Manu Cornet's Goomics (i.e. originally Google-internal comics).
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• partiallypro 7y ago
  Nothing makes me want to subscribe to a company's offerings more than timelines, or threats it might be eliminated. That is one of the many reasons why GCP has not taken off; outside of Amazon and Microsoft just having much better salesmen/women. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
• deleted 7y ago
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• belval 7y ago
  This has to be fake. With their reputation for killing off products this is asking for companies to drop their services.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    This has to be fake even though they have history of doing just that?
• echelon 7y ago
  Oh my god. How is Google so clueless to let this leak? Now that we know they're not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023, what reason does anyone in their right might have to use their services? I was previously considering GCP. And now I'm not. Great job, Google. You're so short-sighted you'll remain in adtech forever. Not even your founders could keep interest. This leak was a billion dollar mistake. And I'm grateful for it. It's saved me a whole lot of headache.
  • rumanator 7y ago
    > Now that we know they're not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023 I have no clue how anyone could arrive at that interpretation. What exactly let you to that conclusion?
    • benburleson 7y ago
      A little bit of reading between the lines combined with Google's history of sunsetting services that aren't creating enough profit.
    • slenk 7y ago
      "The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. "
    • echelon 7y ago
      From two sources. 1) The article. > The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. 2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
      • rumanator 7y ago
        > 1) The article. That only means that the team's head is on the chopping block. That's all. > 2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products. This assertion is utterly absurd as you're describing the world's third largest cloud provider, and thus one of the dominant players, of being "underperforming" and justifying pulling the plug on a 8 billion-dolar a year business.
• achow 7y ago
  Only way Google perhaps can take a lead in Cloud is if they invent a new paradigm - quantum cloud or something (just to illustrate the point). That is, change the game and not change themselves for the current game. Google just can't compete with hustlers like Amazon, Alibaba and to some extent Microsoft (ex-Oracle leader not withstanding). Cloud business is commodity operational business.
  • streetcat1 7y ago
    They do. its called AutoML.
  • sneak 7y ago
    Just spitballing: what if they rented compute based on sandboxed access to the huge trove of behavioral and activity data they have on their users (which amounts to everyone who uses the web)? It would be the ultimate differentiator. The only potential competitor would be Facebook, who doesn’t offer cloud services.
    • londons_explore 7y ago
      It's next to impossible to do this at scale while maintaining user privacy. There are some differential privacy techniques which might help, but so far they're rather hard to use and there is no tooling for such things.
      • solarkraft 7y ago
        The trick is to not care.
      • sneak 7y ago
        The United States has no data protection laws to speak of (over this kind of data). Renting/selling access to run queries over this sort of data is entirely legal. All it would take is another half dozen years of our society continuing to move in the direction it has already on privacy. It may just be de jure legal though; I bet it would be shown to be de facto illegal once people started mining data from federal judges and legislators...
• mongol 7y ago
  Makes me very reluctant to build something in Google's cloud. Can they not see value in being third as long as it is profitable?
  • jey 7y ago
    Yeah, why not play the long game by focusing on providing a great experience for developers? Enable today's hobbyists to start the companies of tomorrow on your platform, and let go of chasing the #1 spot with enterprise customers of today. Cloud computing as a market isn't going anywhere, and demand is only going to grow for the foreseeable future. Google already has a leg up on this, their cloud offerings and APIs make a lot more sense than AWS.
  • rabidrat 7y ago
    Sounds like being third is not profitable for them though.
• pcurve 7y ago
  They debated about it but it's a nearly 10 bil per year business now. Why would they walk away from it now?
  • rasz 7y ago
    Because its <10% of their real revenue(ads) source. Non-ad revenue generates ~15%, its a distraction.
• Shakahs 7y ago
  I'm astounded that they would seriously consider closing GCP after committing so much time, money, and effort into building it. Every time there's a GCP story on HN commenters say "I won't use it because Google can just pull the plug." I thought this opinion was silly as GCP is the #3 cloud provider in the world, not a free service like Reader. Guess I was wrong, nothing is safe. Google wants #1 or nothing at all.
  • Lammy 7y ago
    I never thought they would shut down Google+ either. It may have been a “failure” in the sense of not beating Facebook, but it had enough traction among hacker circles especially that I assumed it was here to stay just as the cross-Google identity system if not a standalone Facebook-alike.
  • asplake 7y ago
    However tempting (and it is very tempting), how much they’ve already spent should never figure in this kind of decision (aka the sunk cost fallacy). What matters is the return they will get from future commitments.
    • mc32 7y ago
      That fallacy sunk the Desertron after many years of cost overruns...
    • jjeaff 7y ago
      That, and the strong signaling it would create if they did drop it. That signal being, never ever use a Google product for Enterprise purposes.
      • leppr 7y ago
        More precisely, always have a backup plan. Nothing wrong with running on GCP if you're using it in a platform-abstract way (either by using it as a simple hosting provider, or by going through a layer like the "serverless" framework).
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• deleted 7y ago
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• spbyrne 7y ago
  This feels like a threat. Are they going to graveyard Google cloud? Probably not. But they've discontinued so many random, good services that I'm cautious to 'learn' a new Google tool. I wouldn't want to invest in a product only to be forced to transition to AWS in 3 years. Might as well just skip to AWS.
• karolist 7y ago
  I have a hard time believing articles from sources with no track record making bold claims. Seriously, "theinformation.com" and hardly anyone is skeptical?
  • Invictus0 7y ago
    The Information is a very reputable source. Is this your first time hearing about them?
    • karolist 7y ago
      Admittedly yes, add to the fact it's behind a subscription-wall for me made me question the content. I will research theinformation.com more.
  • rwc 7y ago
    No. The Information is brilliantly sourced.
  • dannykwells 7y ago
    The Information is always light years ahead of other tech sources. Probably the #1 tech reporting outlet. So yes, no one is skeptical. Edit: noticed you work on Google. So that about explains it.
    • deleted 7y ago
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• Analemma_ 7y ago
  > If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely. If I was a paranoid person, I might think this article is a sinister plan from Amazon or Microsoft. A quote like this can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: managers are already wary about GCP because of Google's flaky reputation, hearing a quote like this could easily make it worse, and the lack of new business makes Google all the more likely to shut it down.
  • wlesieutre 7y ago
    I think that's a hole Google dug for themselves, they don't need any help from Amazon or Microsoft
  • londons_explore 7y ago
    Google Cloud was always a "become number one or die" thing. Same with Google Plus. Google has assigned so many engineers to building and running the platform. That means the platform has a high ongoing cost to provide. Unless the platform grows rapidly and grabs a significant chunk of the market, it will never be profitable at Googles current level of investment. You can't scale a project down from 5000 engineers to just 50 and expect it to carry on running as before.
• raiyu 7y ago
  The crazy part about this is that in the meeting of setting targets one option that came up was folding the cloud unit entirely. And this was already after billions invested. I don't really believe that they will leave the cloud wars, but still goes to show you the scale and profitability of their ad business and how central it is that even after billions of invested they can still decide to shutter something. Doesn't exactly instill confidence in your customers to trust you for the service you provide.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    Why not abandon a project that isn’t successful just because you invested billions? Doing the opposite is the definition of the “sunk cost fallacy”.
    • macintux 7y ago
      Sometimes it's worth running a project at a loss in exchange for other benefits, such as enterprises' trust that you will be a good product steward. If they kill GCP, what CTO in their right mind would ever choose Google for a mission critical service?
      • scarface74 7y ago
        Has Google ever shown to be good product stewards or to know how to engender the trust of their customers?
    • somebodythere 7y ago
      Is #3 in a massive-scale business like enterprise cloud considered unsuccessful?
      • scarface74 7y ago
        All cloud computing put together is less than 10% of total enterprise computings. Again are they profitable? If the article is to be believed, there own management doesn’t think so and as I posted below, they are distant third at less than 5%.
• sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
  This a self fulfilling prophecy. They set a deadline to be a top player, but now that the strategy has leaked, lots of customers will abandon or not take up the service since they who wants to invest in a cloud service that could be abandoned in a few years? The writing is on the wall now.
• Scramblejams 7y ago
  Ha! A year ago I steered away from GCP for a long-term personal project because I had a small but persistent worry that they'd shut it down, and switching clouds has a cost. I considered myself near-crazy for making the decision on that basis -- they wouldn't do that, would they?! that's silly! that's ridiculous! -- and was a little embarrassed to reveal my rationale to others. Saying it out loud sounded so alarmist, so far-fetched. And yet here we are. Glad I kept clutching those pearls. #2 by 2023? Good luck. I wouldn't bet a dollar on them knocking Amazon or Microsoft off their perches by then, and I won't spend another dollar on GCP.
  • amiller2571 7y ago
    I no longer use any of Google's services and neither does my employer for this reason. We did have one application running on their cloud, but decided to move it to aws because we just can't trust them to keep anything around. Every year we had to rebuild some part of our app, because they replaced or completely removed some feature we were using. It got old and we were done with it...
• bitL 7y ago
  Google Cloud could have easily dominated the market if they were willing to share their internal technology instead of knock-offs they offered. Now it's too late, competition improved their mediocre offerings and outside TPUs there is no advantage anymore.
  • codingslave 7y ago
    From what I have heard, a ton of google internal infrastructure is actually aging and not as nimble by todays standards. It was innovative in 2010, but has been largely commoditized.
    • bitL 7y ago
      My point was that had they initially released cloud based on what they had at the time, AWS would have had a very hard time competing. These days as you mentioned their competitors moved on and even K8S is surpassing Borg in some ways.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    It was my impression that the publicly-released versions are better than the originals. It's not that k8s is a knock-off of borg; k8s is a sort of borg 2.0, etc. Am I mistaken?
    • justincormack 7y ago
      Kubernetes still runs on top of Borg on GCP.
• AaronFriel 7y ago
  As a Google Cloud Platform customer, this is pretty concerning news and seems likely to drive me to start looking at alternatives and also likely to avoid placing any dependencies on Google-specific platform features. So, if any Google Cloud employees are reading this, please report back that this just killed any interest I had in Anthos, Google Cloud Run, the managed Google "Kubernetes Apps", etc. Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes.
  • sitkack 7y ago
    All platforms not under your control should be viewed as a risk. > Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes. I think this is perfectly healthy and a stance you should take everywhere.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      This is certainly not as true with Microsoft or AWS. You remember the old saying that “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”? If someone bet the farm on IBM in the 70s, they could still buy compatible systems. Do you think you are at more risk betting your enterprise on Microsoft or Google?
      • dralley 7y ago
        Even the newest mainframes are still compatible with code and binaries from the 1960s. You might pay out the ass for the privilege, but it's a legitimately impressive technical accomplishment.
        • kazen44 7y ago
          heck, even 3xx series systems are still compatible on modern IBM mainframes. you can say alot about IBM, but excellent compatibility is not one its weaknesses.
      • OnlineGladiator 7y ago
• staticassertion 7y ago
  Non-paywalled link?
  • freehunter 7y ago
    There's another story climbing the front page right now reporting similar information without a paywall: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants-to-be-top-two-player-in-cloud-by-2023.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants-to-b...
  • deleted 7y ago
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• doublement 7y ago
  Every company should question the businesses they're in periodically. But having that discussion leak to the public is disastrous. Trust in executive decisions at Google must be extremely low if all their internal business keeps becoming public knowledge.
• lordnacho 7y ago
  You have to wonder whether "must be number 1 or 2" came out of some pop-management text. What exactly is wrong with being on the list of potential cloud providers for almost every project? Have you ever been on a non-MS project where someone didn't at least mention GCP instead of AWS? Google being as profitable as it is can afford options. Why not sit around in number 3 spot?
  • scarface74 7y ago
    No. No CTO who valued their career would go with GCP. “No one ever got fired for choosing AWS/Microsoft”. Even if Azure isn’t held in as high esteem as AWS, businesses trust Microsoft.
  • one_electron 7y ago
    it did! an entire generation of MBAs learned from jack welch, who popularized be #1 in anything you compete in (and if not, exit). for those interested in management fads, https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/jack-welch-built-ge-success-on-continuous-learning/ https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-succes...
    • dralley 7y ago
      We also have Jack Welch to thank for stack ranking (ranking the bottom X% of employees in any given team, no matter how elite they are, as "underperforming"). The self-inflicted damage management fads (and Welch's Ilk in particular) have caused to our economy is incalculable.
      • paganel 7y ago
        Wasn't he also the person responsible for "building up" GE Capital, i.e. the division that almost took down GE in late October - early November 2008?
  • jcrites 7y ago
    The article claims, if I understood it correctly, that GCP will not be profitable unless it reaches the scale of being at least #2. The implication is that economies of scale are necessary for profitability. For example, in 2014, James Hamilton spoke about how every day that year, AWS was adding enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon's global infrastructure when it was a $7B annual revenue enterprise (2004). That scale of build-out, server purchasing, etc. presumably justifies and enables significant cost reductions, such as buying equipment from vendors in bulk with steep discounts, or buying or building large facilities at once, etc. AWS is custom designing many parts of its stack including networking chips and software, ARM-based CPUs, and more; that kind of investment is only worthwhile at a certain large scale. This scale presumably motivated AWS's purchase of chipmaker Annapurna Labs in 2015. Some operator of a few colocation facilities, by comparison, could not justify designing custom silicon since their scale would not allow them to recoup the R&D costs. Before AWS reached whatever scale made these kinds of investments worthwhile, they were purchasing commodity hardware. To pick another example, a company like SpaceX can only be profitable if it launches a certain minimum number of rockets per year. Without enough rocket launches, and demand from customers, you can't recoup the R&D budget needed to design them. Google has a head start in cloud because their company's existing facilities are already huge. However, public infrastructure has different demands than internal infrastructure, and it sounds like the necessary investments in public have been costly.
• clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
  Would this also put a meta deadline on Stadia since, I assume, Stadia utilizes Google Cloud?
  • ianamartin 7y ago
    I imagine google will keep the technology around to support their own products. I read this to mean they will stop selling access to it.
    • _vertigo 7y ago
      I find it hard to believe that Stadia would outlast GCloud, but then again I find this entire kerfluffle hard to believe..
• xj9 7y ago
  i run a bunch of services for some online social clubs and foss projects that i'm involved in. i've floated between a bunch of different service providers (Digital Ocean, Scaleway, Hetzner, Joyent Public Cloud, Vultr, and Linode to name a few) and now i'm working on setting up some colo infrastructure. i'll probably keep some of the cloud stuff around for failover and maybe some edge cache type stuff, but you don't really need cloud unless you have extremely variable loads on your system. i won't say cloud isn't nice, i've been able to learn a lot by playing around with cloud servers. just good to remember that cloud isn't the only option for a lot of workloads.
• flipgimble 7y ago
  These executives have no one to blame for erosion of trust in Google but themselves. Here is a company that appears to be driven by transient market share in their decisions while appointing itself the caretaker of the open internet and the dictator of open standards.
• ogre_codes 7y ago
  Even prior to this supposed leak, it would be really difficult as a developer to build anything reliant on Google's technology stack. There is a huge number of killed projects; abandoned platforms; and projects like maps where low/ no fees have become prohibitively expensive. Building atop Google is betting the farm on a fickle master.
  • sixothree 7y ago
    And no offense to the Google team, but they are just awful at UI. I cannot imagine using anything Google related to manage complex hosting scenarios.
    • ogre_codes 7y ago
      Well Amazon isn't exactly the king of great UI either and I'm not in love with Azure's cloud services platform management tools. All of these platforms have an extremely dense set of options which tend to change fast which leads to a very tough UI challenge and rapid UI rot.
      • sixothree 7y ago
        Definitely prefer Azure in terms of UI at least than AWS. I don't even want to know what google is doing with management.
• tanilama 7y ago
  There is NO WAY to retire Google Cloud... This is the ultimate suicide you need to take to destroy public trust, once and for all.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    Have you been following Google?
    • tanilama 7y ago
      Closely yes. But I think even the idea of retiring is insane. This is not any free customer facing product. The impact is totally different.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        You mean like Google Fiber?
        • tanilama 7y ago
          Shoot....Forget about this one... But warranted, Google Fiber had never grown to Google Cloud's importance I would say
          • ben_jones 7y ago
            They literally had entire cities cheering for the arrival of their product, and they shuttered it.
            • dralley 7y ago
              At least the people who currently have it, will continue to have it (well, hopefully).
              • scarface74 7y ago
• codingslave 7y ago
  I still lay claim that google is not hiring the talent that they think they are or claim to be. With such huge budgets and failed product after failed product one has to wonder what is the genesis of their failings. Having met countless arrogant but mediocre engineers that leave Google after four years, I will bring up the old algorithms only hiring nets bad employees with good memories.
  • OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    I do think their engineers have likely slipped in quality over the years, but that's not the problem. The problem is their culture of product managers being rewarded for launching projects and nobody being rewarded for maintaining projects. They financially incentivize people to launch and kill projects. It sounds like a leadership problem, because only leadership can change the culture like that.
    • GVIrish 7y ago
      Probably a lot to do with this. Incentives are probably the strongest driver of behavior in a company, much stronger than any stated strategy. If people are richly rewarded for launching new products, they'll optimize their work for launching new products, even when that product doesn't make sense, or when more business value could be created by supporting/enhancing an existing product. For another example, Microsoft's dysfunction and infighting in the Ballmer era can be tied to stack ranking. If your success depends on your peers doing worse than you, you're incentivized to not cooperate at best, snipe and sabotage at worst. Google absolutely has to change their internal incentives if they want to sustain success into the future. In the case of GCP they're gonna have to start figuring out how they can shift their culture to wooing and keeping enterprise customers. This leak, their culture, and their history is gonna make that a tall order.
    • codingslave 7y ago
      This is also true, but Google is a very engineering centric company, who they hire with regards to software end up running other parts of their business. Lots of really powerful people there came in and worked as engineers.
• mc32 7y ago
  I’m guessing this is a cloud compute only decision and does not include Google Apps... I cant imagine them pulling out of Google Apps.
• dyeje 7y ago
  It would be the ultimate Google move to sunset GCP. Literally no product they provide is safe.
  • ar_lan 7y ago
    "Search" will no longer be supported beginning January 1, 2021.
    • samspenc 7y ago
      I know you said that in jest, but in all seriousness, I think search and ads will definitely be around since they are the #1 player and making boatloads of money from search and ads. Google seems to have a tendency to shut down products that meet the following criteria: [1] Free products that could have millions or billions of users, but no revenue or not enough revenue to justify a team working on it [2] Free or paid products in which Google is NOT #1 I am as shocked as everyone else that Google would consider shutting down GCP if it's not #2 by 2023. I would have thought they would treat enterprise business very differently from their consumer business ... but I guess not. I am also extremely skeptical they'll be able to make it to #2 over the next 4 years. So I guess we might as well say goodbye to GCP at this point.
  • LinuxBender 7y ago
    Be sure to add it to the list [1] when they do. [1] - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
• southphillyman 7y ago
  What would this mean for the NYC office?
• fredley 7y ago
  Well this is one way to kill your cloud business. Even a hint that execs were considering or debating this move is enough to kill any serious company's interest in GCP. Why would you ever consider GCP over AWS/Azure knowing that the Google scythe could kill it at any time, with your suspicions confirmed by a leak this? Bonkers.
  • jfoster 7y ago
    It's so stupid that they've got this reputation now. A lot of the things they've killed could've instead been sold/spun off instead. Shutting down successful services that are not successful enough by Google's standards has given them a bad rep at the same time as destroying value. Reader could've been a successful company on its own for sure, for example. I wasn't a user of it, but there was enough people who loved it enough.
    • xvector 7y ago
      It’s a well-deserved reputation. I’m glad it’s sticking
      • setr 7y ago
        He meant it was stupid that Google let itself gain this reputation; it was easily avoidable
    • Tyr42 7y ago
      I think google builds stuff in a way where it depends on the google stack. That makes it harder to spin off or sell, as you'd basically have to re-write it.
      • throw_away 7y ago
        If only they had their own externally available cloud service where they could dogfood their stuff on and spin-off could be an account transfer.
    • datavirtue 7y ago
• alexnewman 7y ago
  We use almost every cloud. Currently I see GCP TPU options beat the pants off of everyone. I love bigquery. Azure has by far the best storage options. The bucket storage is much cheaper. The azure file storage is best of class. I don't like it's bigquery/athena alternatives AWS is the incumbent, I love the spot market, but more and more we have just been running low end workloads there. Athena is the best of class of analytics tools if your data is already in a bucket. We are firing up our IBM cloud presence now.
  • dralley 7y ago
    >We are firing up our IBM cloud presence now. I'm curious as to how this will change with the acquisition of Red Hat. It's still too recent to see any kind of impact yet.
    • alexnewman 7y ago
      They already are making the same mistakes as other vendors. They think the managed openstack/k8s services are something that big people use. The reality is tools like kops or aks-engine support a much more stable cluster.
• oarabbus_ 7y ago
  Having extensively used AWS, and having spent a considerable amount of time with GCP, I think AWS is the superior product for the vast majority of enterprises.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• hmd_imputer 7y ago
  What is funny is the link reads as "google-reportedly-wants-to-be-top-two-player-in-cloud-by-2023.html"
  • setr 7y ago
    Do or die
• zapita 7y ago
  AWS is unassailable as number one, but Azure is more fragile than they might appear in their #2 position. They use their Office online revenue to boost their numbers (EDIT: apparently they don't do that anymore), and their utilization is probably lower than the competition because they rely heavily on bundling new cloud services into legacy contracts at renewal to reach their targets. So lots of Office / Outlook / AD / Windows Server customers are getting hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars worth of Azure that they’re not using, but count against their revenue number anyway. On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of the three. What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead. I think if Google were to get serious about communicating focus and dedication to their cloud business (the opposite of what they’re doing now), they could conceivably catch up to Microsoft.
  • tuwtuwtuwtuw 7y ago
    > Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Can you describe what you are referring to here? I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.
    • steverb 7y ago
      I've been quite pleased with the Azure stack myself. There is the issue of figuring out what the marketing team named the damned thing you are looking for, but I had the same problem with AWS. I am focused primarily on .Net though, so your YMMV by a lot.
      • andybak 7y ago
        > There is the issue of figuring out what the marketing team named the damned thing you are looking for, but I had the same problem with AWS. Does Azure have an equivalent for this invaluable resource? https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
        • 7y ago
• oarabbus_ 7y ago
  GCP is more customizable/better for edge cases of power users, but AWS is better for something like 90% of users
• spullara 7y ago
  After this leak they should probably go ahead and turn it off.
• johnnycab 7y ago
  The analysis from the Gartner Magic Quadrant circa July 2019, states some of it's concerns/cautions with regards to cloud based offerings from Alibaba v Google, which not only highlights how far ahead the top two contenders really are in the race, but also set to continue their meteoric rise. "Alibaba Cloud earns 90% of its revenue in China and has not appreciably grown its enterprise customer base outside of China. Alibaba has limited capabilities in terms of an MSP ecosystem, third-party enterprise software integration and operational tools; and small global field teams limit adoption outside of China." "Google demonstrates an immaturity of process and procedures when dealing with enterprise accounts, which can make the company difficult to transact with at times. This can be attributed to its nascent focus on the enterprise market. The immaturity of process is most pronounced in areas such as contract negotiation, discounting, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing, integration with enterprise systems and support."
• roystonvassey 7y ago
  I worked with GCP on a small (<6 weeks) project last year and the experience left me with a bad taste. Their reps were fairly condescending, questioned my requests regularly, over-engineered what was a fairly straight-forward ask (twice in a week updates, for a 6 week project) where the specs were clearly laid out at the beginning. I then realized that the people who noted the specs and the people who actually had to work on it had not spoken to each other at all so I had to explain the entire ask all over again. Somewhere down the line, they came back to me to let me know that I had not given them clear instructions and what I had asked was impossible. In the meanwhile, an intern in my team had got the entire solution up-and-running on a small, self-hosted containerized service. I showed them and they mumble about something to be fixed and how they'll get back to me. All in all, a complete waste of time, resources and bandwidth. I am glad it was for just six weeks and in hindsight, I'm happy I didn't get the rest of my team involved in it. We have worked with Azure since then and I am super impressed with their professionalism. There are hiccups but the understanding I now hold is this - Google (probably still) builds great consumer products but have zero clue on how to work with enterprises while it appears to be the opposite with Microsoft. Their razor-sharp and sole focus on enterprise appears to help them excel instead of having a diffused, unclear strategy that is Google's currently.
  • datavirtue 7y ago
    Azure support is literally amazing. Super easy to engage, perfect follow through every time, and thier techs are competent as hell.
  • acruns 7y ago
    I have done a few GCP projects and this is the typical OP of the google team. I think their intentions are good, trying to make sure you get everything perfect, but customers do not really care to spend all the corresponding time updating the google team twice a week for something that would be better served with as-needed support. And there can be a flavor of condesending attitude when they assume the customer doesn't know anything.
• dangerboysteve 7y ago
  I'm just flabbergasted this would even leak out. It will be a self fulfilling proficiency as prospective clients will shy away from Google. They must be doing damage control right now with all their latest enterprise clients who switched over. May as well start the clock on the Stadia death march. I give it 13 months.
• LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  Translated: Google sunsetting own cloud in 2023
• sillysaurusx 7y ago
  For what it's worth, I've had nothing but positive experiences with GCP plus TFRC: https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc (If I had negative experiences, believe me, I'd be the first to point them out. Just a happy user.) There are a few annoying aspects of GCP, but the complexity seems roughly equal to AWS. Both have their pain points. The $300 free credit is immensely helpful. I hope Google keeps it.
• theflyinghorse 7y ago
  The thread is mostly concentrating on the negatives here. I'm hoping that GCP will offer some incentives for the next 3 years that I could take advantage of to help my side gig grow on the cheap! If they die in 3 years, well I don't rally care as I have no clue if I'll have a business in the next 12 month. Of course, this article does say "The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies" with emphasis on "big", but maybe there will be some trickle down for the small fry amongst it all.
• yc_2345 7y ago
  I have sometimes wondered why they don't offer a separate, uncomplicated fixed price (and bounded resource) version - basically like a Heroku - and provide a migration path to their core offerings.
  • slig 7y ago
    Isn't that AppEngine?
    • ReverseCold 7y ago
      AppEngine is priced very high and is definitely not a constant price. I'm using it right now, and it costs me $5/day to run an Elixir/Phoenix app for ~2000 active users. I'm leaving as soon as my free credit runs out.
  • brown9-2 7y ago
    Isn’t that what GCE is? https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing
  • christilut 7y ago
    You mean Firebase?
• faizshah 7y ago
  This is insane, GCP has been a great experience for me and I have even been working on getting their certs now because I like working with it that much despite them currently being worthless. Its crazy that they would even consider closing google cloud after gaining so much traction. Especially with BigQuery, Dataflow, Firebase, Kubernetes engine and Cloud Run being at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going. Dialogflow is also hitting at the right time where smart home products and home automation are becoming mainstream. How do they expect to do in 7 years (launch of compute engine) what Amazon did in 13? Its crazy that they would be so unreasonable.
• gramakri 7y ago
  Why is this up for a debate? Is it not profitable already?
  • filoleg 7y ago
    IIRC Google killed off a lot of products that were profitable. They just decided it was not profitable enough by their own arbitrary metrics, not that it wasn’t profitable at all
• yyyk 7y ago
  There's no way for Google Cloud to achieve this. Even if Google does everything perfectly, both AWS and Azure are just too entrenched to be dethroned in such a short period of time. Therefore, this story is almost equivalent to saying 'Google will ignore cloud from 2023 onward'. Were I ever to consider GCP, this alone would cause me to run far far away. If Google is serious at all about cloud, it would issue a quick denial. If it does not, well, it would be evidence in favour of the story's credibility.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ronmex 7y ago
  I'm surprised that the overall sentiment of the comments indicates that gcloud's offerings are inferior to aws / azure. I've worked with all of the clouds and have found Google to have the best product. Their GKE with built in Istio support is a killer feature. Spanner is best in class. Competitors do not provide a useable alternative to Firestore realtime database. Pizza Hut is the most popular pizza in the USA, doesn't mean it's the best.
  • yuy910616 7y ago
    Bigquery is excellent too
    • faizshah 7y ago
      BigQuery is by far their killer app. Every place Ive interviewed for or worked with that uses GCP uses it mainly for BigQuery. Dataflow and Cloud Run are likely to be up there soon.
  • derefr 7y ago
    Endorsed. If GCP goes away, I'll be sad to see it, because the tech itself is great. Google don't necessarily have to be the ones running it, maybe. Perhaps another bigcorp could acquire GCP from Google?
• dang 7y ago
  As with previous articles, The Information has unlocked this one for HN readers. Thanks! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22the%20information%22%20unlock&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
• mark_l_watson 7y ago
  Good luck to them. For my personal projects, GCP is definitely my preference although I also like AWS and enjoyed using Azure while I had a Microsoft BizSpark grant. GCP is very easy to use. For huge customers GCP provides good support, but I think that the GCP team really have to work harder to support small companies (I base this on HN comments, no personal experience).
• whatitdobooboo 7y ago
  Google* isnt really an enterprise focused company. Getting talent and management to work on it must be tough, and internally I've heard it is sort of looked down on. They have a pretty poor partner network as well. I think if they beefed that up theyd do well.
• summerlight 7y ago
  I'm confused; is it realistic for any company to deprecate a product with $8B annual revenue? Compare to AWS, it is small but still significant even for Google. Compare this to YT, which annual revenue estimation is around $15B ~ $25B and CapEx/OpEx is supposed to be very large.
  • rifung 7y ago
    I don't think revenue matters as much as profits? I assume the thinking is that if the ROI is not high enough, then you might as well just invest that money into the more profitable portions of your business.
    • summerlight 7y ago
      The problem is that there's no real way to measure and appropriately attribute expense and profit to cloud; most infrastructures are shared across Google products and cloud. Simply put, none of ads, search or YT cannot exist without the cloud infrastructure.
• outside1234 7y ago
  DEPRECATION NOTICE
• whatitdobooboo 7y ago
  Bringing in an Oracle exec to run it seems pretty ill-advised. Oracle is a services company of the past - GCP needs to be a services company of the future as cliche as that is. The tech is there - but alignment isnt. I dont know if Google is capable of anything outside of search.
• shadowtree 7y ago
  They put the guy that ran ORACLE'S CLOUD STRATEGY in charge of GCP. ORACLE'S. CLOUD. STRATEGY. Let's hire Thomas Kurian, bang up job on Fusion and ... oh wait, what do you mean with 'total failure'? Oracle bought Sun, it had the keys to be the third force against AWS and MSFT - and they totally blew it. Just an amazing fumble, worse than MSFT and smartphones.
  • ldiracdelta 7y ago
    Once it was Oracle, the trust issues were vastly larger even if they did end up executing.
  • infinitone 7y ago
    Didn't know this, pretty crazy hire... what's the reasoning behind that. Maybe they were desperate as the vmware founder wanted to retire and they needed to fill in the seat quickly?
    • neilobremski 7y ago
      I didn't know this either ... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kurian-google-will-compete-more-aggressively.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kuri...
  • joejerryronnie 7y ago
    To be fair, my understanding is that Oracle basically went in the opposite direction that Kurian wanted to go on cloud strategy. With that said, yeah, nobody's thinking outside the box when hiring an executive from Oracle.
    • faizshah 7y ago
      Oracle Cloud in the last year has been completely changing and restructuring their Cloud and the actual organizational structure of their Oracle Cloud team to match AWS. They even started calling it Oracle Cloud 2.0
  • 7y ago
• outside1234 7y ago
  The Google Cloud employees should unionize.
• brown9-2 7y ago
  > Ultimately, the Google executives decided in the spring of 2018 that the cloud computing opportunity was simply too big to give up on. All of the anecdotes in this article are from early to mid 2018. So why is someone leaking these stores 18 months later?
  • pasttense01 7y ago
    Because it took a long time to finally reach someone who was willing to leak it (plus article preparation and editing time).
• chupa-chups 7y ago
  I don't understand how an enterprise as big as google doesn't have the energy to simply eat through time and money until it succeeds. Even if the share has to be divided forever between 3 major cloud providers, it would eventually pay off.
  • kresten 7y ago
    >> simply eat through time and money until it succeeds. That was Microsoft’s Bing versus Google strategy. Money can’t necessarily buy market dominance, even vast quantities of money.
    • scarmig 7y ago
      Didn't Bing end up profitable?
  • derefr 7y ago
    Time and money aren't Google's scarce resources. Engineers are. Every Google project would love nothing more than to steal other Google project's staffing for themselves.
    • chupa-chups 7y ago
      I guess google values intelligent people, and since intelligence involves - thinking outside the box - considering consequences - estimating impacts of 2nd and 3rd order this should lead to the realization this may not be a good idea: why didn't the managers (which quite probably have been engineers before becoming managers) consider that?
• gorbachev 7y ago
  If there was a betting marketplace for this, I would bet all my money against Google. Three years is nowhere near enough time for Google to catch up when the current situation is that they're falling more behind every day. They also have no way to fix the customer service issues plaguing every product of theirs, including their cloud stuff. So, so many stories about how bad they are.
• kresten 7y ago
  Does this mean google cloud is closing by that date? What isn’t google going to close? Would it be reasonable to now run a headline “Google to close cloud in 2023 following failure to dominate”
• mynegation 7y ago
  > to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively Does that imply that Microsoft is first and Amazon is second? That is surprising to me.
  • paragraft 7y ago
    Yes they goofed on that. They do correctly state marketshares later in the article (i.e AWS #1)
• m0zg 7y ago
  If they're going aggressively for market share this could only mean one thing: price war. They've been running (and cost-optimizing) cloud services for much longer than Amazon or Microsoft, so they could actually make it _really_ painful for the other two players, and they know it. Most of all, they could undercut them on egress pricing. I'm all for it. The current pricing in all three clouds is nuts.
• bobbydreamer 7y ago
  These statements just made me remember a quote from Will ferrels movie. Ricky Bobby : Wait, Dad. Don't you remember the time you told me "If you ain't first, you're last"? Reese Bobby : Huh? What are you talking about, Son? Ricky Bobby : That day at school. Reese Bobby : Oh hell, Son, I was high that day. That doesn't make any sense at all, you can be second, third, fourth... hell you can even be fifth. Ricky Bobby : What? I've lived my whole life by that! GCP is easy to use when compared to AWS according to me. I have used both the service providers. Starting with Firebase, Firebase hosting, App Engine, Compute Engine, GKE, BigQuery and monitoring via stackdriver. Everything just fits very well. Number of people visiting their yearly Sessions are increasing and their training platforms(Qwiklabs & YouTube videos) are very much precise. Most of the issues are solved in Stackoverflow itself and you have Google groups for each products.
• LaserToy 7y ago
  Not surprised. I think we have to get out of GCS as soon as possible.
• qaq 7y ago
  offer Spanner at low cost as a loss leader that would def offer something no other cloud has.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• antoncohen 7y ago
  I want to put on end to the "you can't contact Google" comments that comes up every time Google Cloud makes the front page. You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS. We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have a Slack channel we share with our dedicated GCP contacts, so we can easily ask questions. Two of my coworkers just got out of a meeting with Google PMs less than an hour ago. Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team(s). Yes, you have to pay for support. They have a couple different support options, depending on your needs. But you have to pay for support with AWS too. The one bad thing about Google Cloud support is their Level 1 support. It is very easy to submit a support ticket, and they will respond quickly. But if you are highly technical, and know what you are doing, and can research yourself, Level 1 support it nearly useless. They do make it easy to to escalate, with a prominent Escalate button in the ticket. And you can always escalate through your direct contacts (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineer). But it would be nice if Level 1 could be bypassed, or were more technical. I think they are trying to iterate on the process. They recently started offering to have a video call a lot of the time, which isn't my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying to improve the Level 1 support. If you are using Google Cloud as part of a business, you will be able to contact them. You will probably have an account manager that you can probably meet in person with. If you pay for support you will be able to submit support tickets, real humans will respond, and respond quickly.
  • nikanj 7y ago
    In one corner, I have the good experience of you, a semi-anonymous internet commentor. In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN. I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.
• paggle 7y ago
  One of the great downsides of Google having such a massive hit with Search is that they don’t have the kind of willpower that it takes to absorb defeat after defeat on the path to victory. Look at how many failed fucking pen devices Microsoft has shipped, since Windows CE. They don’t cut funding, they just keep going and going and going. Google doesn’t do this.
• Despacito2019 7y ago
  Where would that would leave kubernetes? would they scale down their investment on kubernetes and all asociated project like knative ?
• Despacito2019 7y ago
  As someone who literally have a decision to make tomorrow for a large move from Azure/Hosted to consolidate GCP I may have to send a few email to postpone that meeting... This is really bad for GCP
• annoyingnoob 7y ago
  Google can keep its cloud and I'll keep my data. Its the best way.
• DevKoala 7y ago
  This sounds like an empty New Years resolution, but perhaps they have a well thought out plan.
• jpeg_hero 7y ago
  Wow, this is a real indictment of goog’s plan to take the loot from ads and spend to diversify. They basically invented the cloud model, and if they don’t have the culture and the ability to expand to this most naturally of expansion areas.. they are doomed. There is something seriously broken at google. This puts Larry quitting in more context. He’s lost confidence in google doing this, then there is nothing left for the org to do. Over—compensated, over-entitled, over-talented engineers that, when put together can’t actually accomplish anything. Maybe gutting the product org all those years ago was a mistake.
  • jpeg_hero 7y ago
    Also, I feel like they are in an almost impossible competitive position. Their main competitive tool against aws is further differentiation by ‘moving up the stack” with more and more “do the tough stuff for you” platform services that fewer and fewer people use. It’s getting so baroque with no developer “pull”, people aren’t begging for these services to solve a real problem, more like goog saying “here’s another piece that could be helpful” Meanwhile, aws’s long history of walking people up the ramp of IAAS makes it more of a fit when they do start adding PAAS service and they fill a real need and get great adoption(for some/a lot of them)
  • Will_Do 7y ago
    I agree with the general sentiment. It is staggering that they have spent at least 10s of billions if not > 100b trying to diversify away from ads and still do not have meaningful alternative revenue stream. It is one of the biggest mysteries to me. How is it possible to throw so much money and so many smart people at so many different problems and have no results? Microsoft and Amazon don't seem to have this problem but Facebook seems to suffer as well. That being said, their advertising business is insanely successful. I suspect they could at least double their stock price (and thus the wealth of their investors) if they dumped their speculative bets and focus on ads. It is extremely profitable and revenue keeps growing > 20% from a large base.
    • jpeg_hero 7y ago
      Yeah, ads best medium since golden age of tv and it’s not like it’s all strikeouts. They’ve had insanely successful addons: - maps - gmail / google domains / docs - chrome / chrome box / chrome books - Android - YouTube It just seem like the “dream is dead”. Great business though.
• iblaine 7y ago
  GCP generates $8B annually. It's a bit dramatic to think Google will give up on GCP. AWS has a loyal customer base, which is well deserved, but Google does have some unique products (like Spanner) that AWS may never have. Point being there will always be a place in the market for GCP.
• prepend 7y ago
  > Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share Isn’t this backwards? I thought aws was quite a bit bigger than azure.
• etchalon 7y ago
  Have they considered making their pricing easier to understand, or did they collectively decide that the AWS model of "Good luck understanding your bill!" is a good one?
• joejerryronnie 7y ago
  Wow, this seriously highlights Google's lack of understanding regarding enterprise customers. Enterprise purchase decisions I've been a part of place stability and the long term partnership way above cutting edge tech or price. It takes about 2 seconds to extrapolate all of the internal investments you'd have to scrap in 4 years if Google decides to defund GCP.
• AndrewBissell 7y ago
  "Google brass" are basically Alec Baldwin's soulless asshole character from GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS: "We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired."
• m0zg 7y ago
  I actually don't think that's what happened at all. Best I can tell, this was a multi-year, aggressive, OKR-like goal. You're not expected to 100% achieve your OKRs at Google. 100% on everything indicates your OKRs are not aggressive enough and you're sandbagging. You're merely saying: "I think this is worth doing and I'll commit serious effort to achieving this". I don't know why people are concluding that if world domination doesn't happen by 2023 Google will set its cloud datacenters on fire. Or, to be perfectly honest, I do know: it's to drive outrage and clicks. Google is not going shutter any business which brings in more than $1B in profit per year. It never has, and it never will. Disclosure: ex-Googler, GCP user, hold no position in company stock.
• seshagiric 7y ago
  It's a bit odd that the products like Kubernetes came from Google Cloud but they themselves are struggling in the market.
• tekkk 7y ago
  I have thought at times that HN was a place of rational, deep discussion. I cant understand where these types of endless emotional rantings come from. Everyone is going with a bigger hyperbole how "Google is killing GCP, they r so dum". I can understand their ambitious plans, and naturally you decrease funding for a project if it keeps hemorrhaging money. It says the Google C-suite discussed the idea of leaving the market, as any rational person would do, but dismissed it. I think the way article describes these things is putting a whole of color on this. But so what, Google thinks it can beat AWS and Azure? Well, it's good they have big goals. Such a heavy bet on their cloud business seems quite sensible, and while they mention cutting spending if they don't achieve those goals, I don't see it as a big of problem as people seem to think. I mean other cloud providers don't even have that amount of money to put into their cloud businesses' and no one is lamenting about that. To me this whole debate should be about how impractical and out of touch with customers Google has become since.. I can't even recall. Maybe it's the algorithm-based engineer interviews but something's wrong with Google's internal workings. Google Analytics' dashboard is still terrible, I don't like even how Google Docs work, Youtube is I guess ok but they blundered the live-streaming et cetera. I've never used GCP but it always seemed a bit too over-designed and flashy and, well, not practical. On the other hand AWS's console, even though it is at times unintuitive it feels for some reason quite nice and practical. It's weird and subjective, I know. Could it be that when I had my first touch with AWS I had been given a quite positive view of the whole service vs. I have quite negative prior feelings about other Google services that cloud my judgement. Who knows. Yet still, perhaps Googlers at their fancy Mountain View office have become a bit too detached from the regular Joes working for their gray corporate masters who want nothing to do with their hipster dashboards and just want something simple that works. Maybe pride comes before a fall, like with Microsoft. Luckily for MSFT Nadella started to change their culture.
• altgoogler 7y ago
  Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this topic. I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023. > said people with knowledge of the matter. As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw some meeting notes. > The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market. So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an executive level ever. You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level. And finally: > A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this story, but after it appeared released the following statement: "Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate." There may be some truth to these accounts--reality is often between the lines--but this is extremely soft on details and actual first person accounts.
  • ksec 7y ago
    Yes, it could have been Google's competitor making up these stories so enterprise customers would stop and think before switching, it is also better for competitors's sales to pitch on the potential of a shuttered GCP, which you can tell full well if I was a sales I would be referencing this article. And it wouldn't matter of there wasn't even an ounce of truth there, Google's reputation on future roadmap, communication, marketing and product dropping has always been on the negative. Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era.
    • echelon 7y ago
      > Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era. This. A thousand times this! Once hero of the 2000's, Google is turning into the villain; meanwhile Microsoft has embarked on their redemption storyline. Microsoft is a fantastic developer-centric company that has made their platform attractive to even Linux users. Google shuts down all the things you use, prices small shops out of freaking Google Maps, won't pick up the phone, ... Google should hire Satya Nadella. Doesn't Google understand that we should love them? That we should think they're a cool company? They've strayed so far from that. They might as well be Oracle.
• ogre_codes 7y ago
  Another way of looking at this. If you are shopping for a cloud platform Google is a really hard sell. On one hand you have Amazon who really paved the way here and literally built their company atop their platform and currently powers a huge piece of the web. On the other hand you have Microsoft who has decades of experience figuring out how to appeal to CEOs and enterprise customers and can dangle the prospects of integration with existing corporate infrastructure. Google offers the Google name and a reputation for ditching services when the wind shifts. They really have little or no competitive advantage here. I'd personally rather build atop Linode or Digital Ocean than Google or at most, stick to the middle of the road, most generic parts of Google's platform.
• trenning 7y ago
  Off topic: The link for this article is, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202... ?pu=hackernewsyw3xln&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock How did it end up with utm_source=hackernews in the url? Dang is this something you change or is it user submitted?
• d--b 7y ago
  Well first they need to get out of beta!
• Toury2d 7y ago
  Is hacker News turning into Reddit with all these comments?
• StreamBright 7y ago
  Google is an ad company with negligible business success outside of ad-tech. This should be clear by now for everybody.
• kerng 7y ago
  Well, it's pretty obvious Google wont be able to beat either AWS or Azure in the next few years... How can information like this leak or even be entertained internally? Google is famous for terminating, even successful products. Best to stay far away from GCP!
• gigatexal 7y ago
  I’m a fan of BigQuery and by extension GCP. I find it simpler to use than AWS but AWS has more to offer I think. It’s good to have competition in the space.
• Havoc 7y ago
  #1 or #2 seems like such an arbitrary objective. Besides the notion of Google not investing in cloud seems rather ludicrous to me. They might as well formally announce that they're not competing in tech going forward & just count adtech dollars instead.
• kerng 7y ago
  How can they invent Kubernetes and be so clueless about the Cloud from non technical point of view???
• gmanstar 7y ago
  Its a very practical decision, but it becoming public totally screws GCP's credibility in the market
• pizzaknife 7y ago
  do better with trust and your care of enployees than amazon does. thats an easy win
• Trias11 7y ago
  Google brass just fell off and reshuffled at the very top? I think it's prudent to give them some time for internal dust to settle before buying into "conquer the world" deadlines.
• tzury 7y ago
  People with real knowledge to the matter knows that GCP is growing, and more companies are adopting GCP every month. This is an attempt (which according to some of the comments here quite succeed) to create a story where there is no story. Should Google Cloud aim to be better and bigger? Sure. Should Google / Alphabet execs need to discuss challenges and strategy? Sure. What and where is the story? GCP produce new products and features every week [1] At my company, we use all major 3 clouds. The GCP support is super fast. The GCP price is better than other two. Google indeed has a learning curve as a company, and that is at the area of selling to the enterprise. By its DNA, Google is an engineering company, and it takes years to understand how to "attack" the market, build teams of sales, marketing, and all the supporting infrastructure, and they do it. Time will tell how successful they are, but I cannot see any option for them to shut down this great platform known as GCP. It simply make no sense. There is a trend in the media in the recent months to rant about Google by all means and angles, and I tend to think this article is just one of those. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/
  • jacquesm 7y ago
    > and more companies are adopting GCP every month A rising tide lifts all boats. Are more companies adopting GCP because they are leaving Amazon/Azure? Or is it simply because the market is still immature and growing fast?
    • enos_feedler 7y ago
      Who cares if they are leaving Amazon or Azure. All that matters is they use GCP too.
      • jacquesm 7y ago
        According to the title Google does. If the market matures and Google is not able to win customers from Amazon/Azure then they will not attain that #1 position.
        • 7y ago
• asdfq1234 7y ago
  These cloud players need to reduce prices. AWS has not significantly reduced prices in a long time.
• ggm 7y ago
  If a company like Westfield decides to get out of the leasing business, it makes sure its anchor tenants know there is some continuity of lease for their locations, because the value inherent in the property is the lease stability of the anchor tenant. I begin to wonder if cloud has a parallel here: Does Google actually need, for selfish reasons, to inform significant cloud tenants in GCP that continuity of their business is core, and will be factored into any business development, or retiral, or sale options? Elastic Search comes to mind: If you build to a dependency on Elastic, in GCP, its comforting to know it works in AWS but they are not an entirely identical product. From a business continuity model, mostly the same. Different tokens, different backend underneat the ES componentry. Does it matter? Depends how critical Clous ES is to your business.
• bitwize 7y ago
  Dream on, Goog. You're third in a three-horse race. You need a serious, and I mean serious value add to beat Amazon in a LOB where they bring their A game.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• sytelus 7y ago
  I'm doubtful if cloud would be as profitable business in 2023 as it is now. Race to the bottom is already in place and only bound to accelerate further. This is like Microsoft determines to win the phone market in 2015 when iPhone peaked up the steam. By 2015, the smartphone market is changed dramatically.
• keithnz 7y ago
  this is weird, GOOGLE: we want to to be in the top 2 or we will throw our toys and leave / defund. EVERYONE ELSE BITTEN BY GOOGLE DISCONTINUING STUFF: errrr, why would I EVER choose you guys to host my stuff NOW unless you are ridiculously cheap and it would be super simple to switch to azure/aws. heck if I was using them now, and saw this, I'd be making plans/contingencies to shift off them.
• tibiahurried 7y ago
  To be honest, I have little faith in GCP. I really wanted to use GCP for my next side project. I wanted to experiment with a new platform and I did not want to get stuck with AWS. I tried and tried ... but I eventually gave up and went back to AWS. GCP lacks of good, simple, clear documentation, developer documentation, best practices. Their offer is very confusing: just look at the whole firebase thing in regard to user authentication + firestore vs datastore. Switching to AWS made things way easier, there are tons of people out there that most likely have already solved most of the issues you can run into when developing and deploying a service on AWS.
• linsomniac 7y ago
  This reminds me of Google+. I remember one year where they got very serious about G+, tied bonuses to the growth, and otherwise tried to take on Facebook. G+ is shuttered now, but at least I have a cool green check mark next to my name I'm my YouTube comments... :-)
• jaimex2 7y ago
  Sorry Google, you need a time machine to fix this one. No one trusts your products to stick around or has the confidence that you won't shut down their accounts overnight due to an automation thinking something is wrong.
• spicyramen 7y ago
  Cloud is not about developers anymore: is not about tech. Why? Because enterprises understand that the foundation for their apps exists, if not their Cloud reps will listen and develop it for them as long as you are big big contract. Now the power relies all along in decision makers, Google reputation is not good there. Getting Fortune 500, Government contracts is very very very unlikely as in reality from Cx0 perspective...AWS/Microsoft have been there always...new things in Infrastructure...probably not unless you really don't want to give any business to AWS (Walmart/Target) and experimenting the new enterprise Google...no thanks
• lipstone 7y ago
  Do people actually believe GCP is at risk of shutting down? What nonsense.
• netwanderer3 7y ago
  The current issue with many cloud providers today is that they had designed all these fantastic features but then completely left it up to the customers to figure out new use cases on their own. They forgot that the majority of customers don't have much clue about the cloud let alone those advanced features, and cloud providers are sitting here complaining that they are running out of patience waiting for customers to get on board. Designing new features alone is not enough, they must also design the actual use cases to convince customers because most of them don't have any clue of how to actually turn those advanced cloud services into something more useful than just hosting. It's not a capability issue but rather it's a use case problem.
• exabrial 7y ago
  Never used Google for anything important. You're cattle to Google. Their lack of customer support in literally every one of their offerings shows their approach to making money. They will shut you off in a heartbeat and you have no recourse except to email a bot. Ultimately your puny little shop doesn't matter to their bottom line.
  • darkwizard42 7y ago
    They offer excellent customer support for GCP. I think you are conflating this with YouTube or other services.
• 40four 7y ago
  Why would they even care about ‘winning’ the cloud? To what end? Google is officially and advertising company, and the large majority of their revenue depends on it. This strategy is working so well for them, I just don’t see why they would even care about grinding out a little extra market share in the cloud hosting space. Why? Maybe just to boost their ego? Is it really worth it to them? Whatever comparatively small amount of extra revenue they squeeze out will still be dwarfed by the ad revenue. I imagine they will continue doing what they do.
  • cavisne 7y ago
    One of the things that google does is basically trade compute and storage (whether its a google search or gmail storage) for advertising revenue. In a world where the public cloud is dominated by a handful of providers its likely (if not already the case) that AWS will become by far the biggest buyer (with the best economics) of compute and storage. Obviously there are many other barriers to competing with google, but if amazon could provision the amount of storage and compute needed for YouTube and search in the headroom of its public cloud (and even worse if AWS customers could do this for a cheaper cost than google itself) this would be a negative thing for google.
• dragonwriter 7y ago
  This whole story seems weird and inconsistent, but particularly: “The pressure to show more progress very soon in the business extends to Google Cloud product teams, which the company is now asking to develop detailed multiyear strategic plans, a former Google Cloud employee said.” Detailed multi-year strategic planning as a change from 18-month plans seems more consistent with a recognition that significant progress on the obvious indicators is a long slog and that positioning for it is going to take tracking less direct indicators over a longer period than it is with increased pressure for short-term results. Increased pressure for immediate results tends to be accompanied by reduced long-term planning.
• z3t4 7y ago
  It would be funny if Google started using AWS instead of their own datacenters. While the compute capacity per space unit have kept growing exponentially, growth has stagnated as they already got 100% market reach.
• sunstone 7y ago
  So this is a PR disaster for GCP. Already people are penciling out contingency plans because this inept leak. And Google's history of shuttering stuff really doesn't help.
• gpresot 7y ago
  A business like Google Cloud would not be wound down, it would be sold. MS and Amazon woulc not be allowed to buy it for antitrust issues, so potential buyers might include Rackspace and Apple, among others.
• bcheung 7y ago
  People want to develop their tech on an open platform without vendor lock-in. If they pushed an open source platform on top of Kubernetes I know I would be more interested and comfortable using them. Right now I just don't see a strong benefit over others.
• cynusx 7y ago
  I think the main reason they lag behind is because the service is perceived as worse. Amazon and Microsoft have well-established customer-development practices and they learn and resolve customers' issues. Having a good accessible support function is a great start to start listening to your clients but somehow in google culture they only want to look at aggregate statistics of a large userbase to learn something that customers are already trying to tell them through non-existing support channels. For example, I've heard engineers complain about bad instances and intermittent networking issues. Concerns that I have never heard about in AWS except in the very early days of it. I haven't looked at GCP in a long time, but I remember everything being very python-centric and very lightly documented. Winning in technology often comes down to having a serious customer-centric product management function.
• airnomad 7y ago
  Google needs to buy Cloudflare.
• devit 7y ago
  Maybe they could consider applying more reasonable pricing? E.g. Hetzner offers an 8-core 128GB Xeon SkyLake machine with unlimited 1gbps traffic for around $120/month while Google offers n1-highmem-8 with 8 cores and 52GB and no traffic for $240/month. 1gbps unlimited traffic on Hetzner means 324 TB/month, which would cost 26000$ on GCP at the lowest 0.08$/GB rate. So I would consider cutting the instance prices by half, and dividing the bandwidth prices by 1000, and then they will be competitive.
• AMerrit 7y ago
  I'll wait for more information before ditching Google Cloud, but this will certainly speed up getting a fall-back/migration plan together for what we've got on the service.
• gigatexal 7y ago
  Also they just hired a new guy to head up GCP from Oracle, I doubt someone like that would join if there was even a hint of there not being 100% commitment to GCP in the air.
• jl2718 7y ago
  Has this become just a commodity war, or are there major sustainably exclusive technology/IP advantages that define the competition (e.g. processor, hypervisor, database, CDN, OS license)? It seems like third-party suppliers are chipping away at leads in each of these. Is UX or lock-in a significant differentiatior? What is it that defines this business?
• beamatronic 7y ago
  If I wasn’t using it before, then I sure am not going to start now, knowing it’s under the gun
• ruxx 7y ago
  Knowing that there is a risk of being de-platformed and loosing all your client data, and not being able to offer your service, etc, is a deterrent for most people, Google has a very difficult job here to change and then communicate the way they will deal with users will not be like gmail or YouTube.
• eejjjj82 7y ago
  "Last quarter, nearly all of the company’s $40.5 billion in revenue came from advertising. Meanwhile, a collection of newer businesses that Alphabet lumps together as “other bets” in its financial statements, including the self-driving car unit Waymo, generated a mere $155 million in revenue while incurring operating losses of nearly $1 billion." This is purposefully misleading. From the Q3 2019 10-Q: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204419000032/goog10-qq32019.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001... Ad revenue: 33.9B Other revenue: 6.4B "Google other revenues consist primarily of revenues from: Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store; Google Cloud offerings; Hardware; and YouTube subscriptions." "Other revenues" is up nearly 40% q/q compared to Q3 2018: "Our Google other revenues increased $1,788 million and $4,639 million from the three and nine months ended September 30, 2018 to the three and nine months ended September 30, 2019, respectively. The growth was primarily driven by revenues from Google Cloud offerings as well as revenues from Google Play, largely relating to in-app purchases (revenues which we recognize net of payout to developers)."
• lwh 7y ago
  They would have to bring something far more compelling compared to AWS if they are to gain much market share. Either in terms features or notable cost difference. Technical people with a general mistrust of them go into planning with GCP as a hesitant second or third choice. The traditional IT departments moving to Azure aren't going to consider the other vendors much when there's such a direct migration. Combined with headcount and capital cost reduction so clearly mapped out for them.
• ece 7y ago
  There is at least one way Google can get out of this mess: 1) Do serverless through standards and avoid vendor lock-in There's a huge opportunity for a cloud vendor who has a credible zero lock-in offering.