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I'm fairly certain Google Cloud is not profitable. Even if it is profitable, Google will divest from business that don't hit a certain scale (billion $ business

I'm fairly certain Google Cloud is not profitable. Even if it is profitable, Google will divest from business that don't hit a certain scale (billion $ businesses). Basically their goal is to never have employees staffed on projects which yield a low $ / employee ratio. They will invest for a while, but pull the plug after some arbitrary time if it doesn't hit the scale.

izend 7y ago
Exactly, which is the exact opposite of what AWS is doing. They have how many services that very few people use now? But at least they respect their customers and view the cost of running those services as goodwill for their customers.
- echelon 7y ago
  It's the opposite of what AWS is doing, but not what Amazon as a whole is doing. There was a recent article that said they're considering cost-cutting in the Alexa business unit [1]. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-skill-making-money-from-alexa https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-...
  - labradore 7y ago
    Does it seriously take 10k people to make Alexa? And she's way dumber than Google. Yes, they should be cutting some costs.
    - logicchains 7y ago
      Maybe it's one of those many-if-statements style AIs.
      - rumanator 7y ago
        We prefer to call them decision trees. It sounds far fancier.
- labradore 7y ago
  They like to use small teams. I wouldn't be surprised if their least-used AWS product is still profitable (aside from brand-new stuff or obvious non-profits like Deep Racer). The idea is to get people into AWS and help keep them there. You don't do that by making life harder or unpredictable for your customers.
x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
And that's not a bad way to move at least in the short term. The problem is that longterm, people will avoid your products pre-emptively for fear of them being vaporware. Especially with something as serious as cloud implementation in an organization. I would hate to be the guys who now have to rearch all their applications to go from GCP to AWS.

izend 7y ago

Exactly, which is the exact opposite of what AWS is doing. They have how many services that very few people use now? But at least they respect their customers and view the cost of running those services as goodwill for their customers.

echelon 7y ago
It's the opposite of what AWS is doing, but not what Amazon as a whole is doing. There was a recent article that said they're considering cost-cutting in the Alexa business unit [1]. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-skill-making-money-from-alexa https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-...
- labradore 7y ago
  Does it seriously take 10k people to make Alexa? And she's way dumber than Google. Yes, they should be cutting some costs.
  - logicchains 7y ago
    Maybe it's one of those many-if-statements style AIs.
    - rumanator 7y ago
      We prefer to call them decision trees. It sounds far fancier.
labradore 7y ago
They like to use small teams. I wouldn't be surprised if their least-used AWS product is still profitable (aside from brand-new stuff or obvious non-profits like Deep Racer). The idea is to get people into AWS and help keep them there. You don't do that by making life harder or unpredictable for your customers.

x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago

And that's not a bad way to move at least in the short term. The problem is that longterm, people will avoid your products pre-emptively for fear of them being vaporware. Especially with something as serious as cloud implementation in an organization. I would hate to be the guys who now have to rearch all their applications to go from GCP to AWS.