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Competition is always better and welcomed. But I really don't understand what edge google offers other products. If anything, I am always really wary about goo

Competition is always better and welcomed. But I really don't understand what edge google offers other products. If anything, I am always really wary about google and their products. People might say that enterprise services are different, and it's different from free services where if you're not paying you can't expect anything, but there's been paid services by google that have been absolutely terrible like stadia. There's something wrong with Google as a company that I can't think of much that they've done recently that seems solid. There's a reason why managers get paid high salaries, because it starts at the top and flows down. At the very least the marketing for gcp could make it clearer what exactly it's offering that's better: price, ease of management, etc. Because nobody is going to get fired for choosing AWS so there has to be a real clear incentive other than some small technical improvements that don't matter at scale.

franklyt 6y ago
Stadia is a huge project, backed by google. I think it has “canary in the coal mine” features. It does want to be an enterprise service, eventually.
- NDizzle 6y ago
  We'll see how it goes with Stadia. I think it's a fairly terrible product. Google doesn't keep things like it alive for very long.
  - pkulak 6y ago
    Stadia is the best streaming game service there is. People just don't want that product.
    - FridgeSeal 6y ago
      It’s not significantly better than something like rain way, which at least has the courtesy to plug in to your pre-existing games library.
      - sofixa 6y ago
        And, if i'm reading their site correctly, requires you to have a gaming PC with good networking. It's not even in the same ballpark as Stadia! What you should be comparing Stadia to is GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, Shadow, which provide the computing power as a service. Stadia eschews Windows to run the games, making it cheaper ( their free tier gives you 1080p/60fps for free, you just have to buy the games on the Stadia Store) but limits what games they can run ( they have to be made for Vulkan). The downside is that you have to buy the games for it, but it supports ubisoft+ ( with an addon on the Ubisoft side). But you don't complain when you have to buy games anew when you buy a new platform ( be it a PS, Xbox or PC), and the same logic applies here. GeForce Now and Amazon Luna are still a Windows server box behind the scenes, with the associated slowness and a bit clunky integrations ( e.g. GeForce Now requires you to re-login to Uplay or Epic or Steam every so often, which is painful with a random password and MFA, and no copy-paste available). Shadow provide you full access to a Windows box, with the associated issues ( game updates and downloads are up to you, disk space is limited, etc.). Stadia has some downsides, but IMHO fares very decently against the competition. I have both it and GeForce Now, for different games, and IMHO Stadia's UX is slightly better.
thedevelopnik 6y ago
I love Google’s Cloud services. I think in many ways they have the best product. I also worked somewhere where we made a million dollar commit. We had to get support through a VAR because Google basically doesn’t offer support. We basically paid someone else to file tickets that got dismissive responses while we had prod meltdown. They’re also price competitive. I was going to go there again in my current position in a very small org. We have GSuite and to get GCloud working we had to turn on Cloud Identity. We didn’t see the free tier in GSuite, so I went to ask GSuite support. The only accessible support was a bot. When I asked the bot how to talk to a human, it helpfully referred me to a bunch of forum posts of people complaining you can’t talk to a human at Google. We’re now with Azure.
- carlosf 6y ago
  I'm looking for a managed Knative solution and Google Cloud Run looks like a great product. The only reason I'm not using it is because I also had first hand experience with Google's atrocious customer service in the past.
- Johnny555 6y ago
  In what ways is Google the best product if you had a prod meltdown and couldn't get support, and when you wanted to increase your use of GCS at another job, you were unable to do so?
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    > In what ways is Google the best product > I think in many ways they have the best product. They didn't say that Google had the best product. They said that in many categories, it was the best. That doesn't mean it's the overall best product. In fact, from their post it seems pretty clear that they ended up deciding that Google Cloud wasn't the overall best product. > if you had a prod meltdown and couldn't get support Presumably, they were implying that customer support _wasn't_ one of those many ways.
    - NoPicklez 6y ago
foxylad 6y ago
We've used Google Appengine for over ten years now. It was the first service to abstract infrastructure, so developers could simply deploy code without worrying about scaling and redundancy. Google's edge (for us) is reliability. Over our ten-year tenure (heh), there have been a handful of incidents when our service was down, most early on before the NDB datastore. I seriously can't remember how many years it's been since our service was down. And when Appengine does break, they do a brutally honest report about exactly what happened, and how they are going to make sure it never happens again. If you've got the interest and time, it's worth searching for articles/videos about Google's SREs. They are fanatics. I know this is anecdotal, but AWS and Azure seem to have multiple outages a year. Every time I'm immensely relieved to be on Appengine.
aliyfarah 6y ago
Google Cloud is just a pleasure to use. It has by far the best documentation, the best user interface, the best CLIs (gcloud etc) and tooling, and they have the most accessible teams of any of the other cloud providers. I remember having an issue with firebase authentication a while back, I posted a question on stackoverflow and a firebase team member had answered it within a few hours. Good luck getting any help with AWS Amplify when you encounter any bugs/issues.
- twelve40 6y ago
  Hm AWS support has been very good to me. Granted we pay for it, but every time I had a question they actually reproduced the situation based on my descriptions, prototyped a solution and came back with exact steps on what to do, pretty quickly, too. (Can't speak for GCP or Azure, I run limited production stuff there since historically we just happened to get a ton of AWS credits first. But, I try to stick with open-source instead of Amazon's proprietary just so that migration or multi-cloud remains an option for us)
- kvz 6y ago
  It speaks volumes that you thought to get your gcp support from stackoverflow. Good that it worked that time, but plenty of SO questions go unanswered, they aren’t private, and there’s not much in the way of guarantees if you have a big problem on your hands. I don’t always ask for gcp support but when I do I’m on my own. Like that one time they shut down production because they didn’t like our credit card card anymore, because of a mismatch in nationality and the UI not offering any way I could change the nationality of our account (we were paying for it with my Dutch credit card, but the company is registered in Germany—our German credit card is prepaid, and GCP did not allow such cards), and obviously getting a new credit card took time. I was very relieved that this wasn’t for our main service (on aws), but the statuspage for it, hosted off-aws for obvious reasons. Now, I don’t always ask aws a question, but when I do they are able to timely help, whether with a technical or billing issue.
jeppesen-io 6y ago
> I am always really wary about google and their products. People might say that enterprise services are different, and it's different from free services where if you're not paying you can't expect anything, but there's been paid services by google that have been absolutely terrible like stadia GCP is a major player in the cloud space. Number 3 last I looked. I fail to see how that compares to Stadia, an expensive experiment that may or may not succeed. Do we judge AWS on Amazon Prime Video's mediocre service? I sure hope not. Let's be clear - GPC is not an experiment. It has massive capital backing > At the very least the marketing for gcp could make it clearer what exactly it's offering that's better: price, ease of management, etc. Okay, but you (I assume) can read beyond marketing. Marketing should not influence your decision (very much) > Because nobody is going to get fired for choosing AWS so there has to be a real clear incentive other than some small technical improvements that don't matter at scale. I don't use GCP but there are many clear advantages. If those do not help your biz case, fine, move on. But if you can't see the advantages, read more
- edoceo 6y ago
  You're talking past each other with the word "marketing". One of you means "messaging and product positioning detail" and the other means "biz-speak drivel"
logicchains 6y ago
>But I really don't understand what edge google offers other products Google Bigquery is head and shoulders above the competition, a really impressive work of engineering. It moreover sidesteps Google's poor API design culture by using SQL instead of something home-grown.

franklyt 6y ago

Stadia is a huge project, backed by google. I think it has “canary in the coal mine” features. It does want to be an enterprise service, eventually.

NDizzle 6y ago
We'll see how it goes with Stadia. I think it's a fairly terrible product. Google doesn't keep things like it alive for very long.
- pkulak 6y ago
  Stadia is the best streaming game service there is. People just don't want that product.
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    It’s not significantly better than something like rain way, which at least has the courtesy to plug in to your pre-existing games library.
    - sofixa 6y ago
      And, if i'm reading their site correctly, requires you to have a gaming PC with good networking. It's not even in the same ballpark as Stadia! What you should be comparing Stadia to is GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, Shadow, which provide the computing power as a service. Stadia eschews Windows to run the games, making it cheaper ( their free tier gives you 1080p/60fps for free, you just have to buy the games on the Stadia Store) but limits what games they can run ( they have to be made for Vulkan). The downside is that you have to buy the games for it, but it supports ubisoft+ ( with an addon on the Ubisoft side). But you don't complain when you have to buy games anew when you buy a new platform ( be it a PS, Xbox or PC), and the same logic applies here. GeForce Now and Amazon Luna are still a Windows server box behind the scenes, with the associated slowness and a bit clunky integrations ( e.g. GeForce Now requires you to re-login to Uplay or Epic or Steam every so often, which is painful with a random password and MFA, and no copy-paste available). Shadow provide you full access to a Windows box, with the associated issues ( game updates and downloads are up to you, disk space is limited, etc.). Stadia has some downsides, but IMHO fares very decently against the competition. I have both it and GeForce Now, for different games, and IMHO Stadia's UX is slightly better.

thedevelopnik 6y ago

I love Google’s Cloud services. I think in many ways they have the best product. I also worked somewhere where we made a million dollar commit. We had to get support through a VAR because Google basically doesn’t offer support. We basically paid someone else to file tickets that got dismissive responses while we had prod meltdown. They’re also price competitive. I was going to go there again in my current position in a very small org. We have GSuite and to get GCloud working we had to turn on Cloud Identity. We didn’t see the free tier in GSuite, so I went to ask GSuite support. The only accessible support was a bot. When I asked the bot how to talk to a human, it helpfully referred me to a bunch of forum posts of people complaining you can’t talk to a human at Google. We’re now with Azure.

carlosf 6y ago
I'm looking for a managed Knative solution and Google Cloud Run looks like a great product. The only reason I'm not using it is because I also had first hand experience with Google's atrocious customer service in the past.
Johnny555 6y ago
In what ways is Google the best product if you had a prod meltdown and couldn't get support, and when you wanted to increase your use of GCS at another job, you were unable to do so?
- ncallaway 6y ago
  > In what ways is Google the best product > I think in many ways they have the best product. They didn't say that Google had the best product. They said that in many categories, it was the best. That doesn't mean it's the overall best product. In fact, from their post it seems pretty clear that they ended up deciding that Google Cloud wasn't the overall best product. > if you had a prod meltdown and couldn't get support Presumably, they were implying that customer support _wasn't_ one of those many ways.
  - NoPicklez 6y ago

foxylad 6y ago

We've used Google Appengine for over ten years now. It was the first service to abstract infrastructure, so developers could simply deploy code without worrying about scaling and redundancy. Google's edge (for us) is reliability. Over our ten-year tenure (heh), there have been a handful of incidents when our service was down, most early on before the NDB datastore. I seriously can't remember how many years it's been since our service was down. And when Appengine does break, they do a brutally honest report about exactly what happened, and how they are going to make sure it never happens again. If you've got the interest and time, it's worth searching for articles/videos about Google's SREs. They are fanatics. I know this is anecdotal, but AWS and Azure seem to have multiple outages a year. Every time I'm immensely relieved to be on Appengine.

aliyfarah 6y ago

Google Cloud is just a pleasure to use. It has by far the best documentation, the best user interface, the best CLIs (gcloud etc) and tooling, and they have the most accessible teams of any of the other cloud providers. I remember having an issue with firebase authentication a while back, I posted a question on stackoverflow and a firebase team member had answered it within a few hours. Good luck getting any help with AWS Amplify when you encounter any bugs/issues.

twelve40 6y ago
Hm AWS support has been very good to me. Granted we pay for it, but every time I had a question they actually reproduced the situation based on my descriptions, prototyped a solution and came back with exact steps on what to do, pretty quickly, too. (Can't speak for GCP or Azure, I run limited production stuff there since historically we just happened to get a ton of AWS credits first. But, I try to stick with open-source instead of Amazon's proprietary just so that migration or multi-cloud remains an option for us)
kvz 6y ago
It speaks volumes that you thought to get your gcp support from stackoverflow. Good that it worked that time, but plenty of SO questions go unanswered, they aren’t private, and there’s not much in the way of guarantees if you have a big problem on your hands. I don’t always ask for gcp support but when I do I’m on my own. Like that one time they shut down production because they didn’t like our credit card card anymore, because of a mismatch in nationality and the UI not offering any way I could change the nationality of our account (we were paying for it with my Dutch credit card, but the company is registered in Germany—our German credit card is prepaid, and GCP did not allow such cards), and obviously getting a new credit card took time. I was very relieved that this wasn’t for our main service (on aws), but the statuspage for it, hosted off-aws for obvious reasons. Now, I don’t always ask aws a question, but when I do they are able to timely help, whether with a technical or billing issue.

jeppesen-io 6y ago

> I am always really wary about google and their products. People might say that enterprise services are different, and it's different from free services where if you're not paying you can't expect anything, but there's been paid services by google that have been absolutely terrible like stadia GCP is a major player in the cloud space. Number 3 last I looked. I fail to see how that compares to Stadia, an expensive experiment that may or may not succeed. Do we judge AWS on Amazon Prime Video's mediocre service? I sure hope not. Let's be clear - GPC is not an experiment. It has massive capital backing > At the very least the marketing for gcp could make it clearer what exactly it's offering that's better: price, ease of management, etc. Okay, but you (I assume) can read beyond marketing. Marketing should not influence your decision (very much) > Because nobody is going to get fired for choosing AWS so there has to be a real clear incentive other than some small technical improvements that don't matter at scale. I don't use GCP but there are many clear advantages. If those do not help your biz case, fine, move on. But if you can't see the advantages, read more

edoceo 6y ago
You're talking past each other with the word "marketing". One of you means "messaging and product positioning detail" and the other means "biz-speak drivel"

logicchains 6y ago

>But I really don't understand what edge google offers other products Google Bigquery is head and shoulders above the competition, a really impressive work of engineering. It moreover sidesteps Google's poor API design culture by using SQL instead of something home-grown.