8 ms·

Amazon is More Interesting than Google

209 points by abtinf 15y ago

buff-a 15y ago
GAE was more interesting to me because it promised to be efficient and scalable if I learned their platform. Turns out that MBAs uploading django onto it are getting more reasonable cost increases than my custom built apps. It was interesting. But if learning these interesting systems doesn't actually result in efficiency - as demonstrated by the numbers showing up in my billing panel - then they aren't really interesting at all. I'm not interesting in pointless hoop jumping. So now I'm learning how to port my GAE app to EC2 or maybe even Heroku (if I can reconcile that with the fact that I've spent the last two years persuading my Heroku friends that its expensive compared to GAE).
- skrebbel 15y ago
  > MBAs uploading django onto it Wow, your MBAs got skills!
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
magicalist 15y ago
I'm finding myself really interested in color spaces recently. Maybe you forgot to title this "I like Amazon Web Services, not App Engine"?
notahacker 15y ago
Is it just me that doesn't grok any argument at all here; there are many criticisms that could be levelled at Google but this apples and oranges comparison is a million miles wide of the mark Google wants the best engineers to work for them; I'm pretty sure the same applies to Amazon. They're not going to let you near the bottom of the AWS stack without you proving that you're towards the extreme of the smart side of the bell curve and signing an employment contract with them. Amazon provides its platform to anyone that wants to develop on it: last time I checked there was no obstacle in the way of signing up for AppEngine, using Google's many APIs to build a sexy looking searchable dynamic local social mobile website which you can then distribute via their webstore, or as a plugin for their browser or app on their mobile operating system. Maps are really cool and useful for that sort of thing. Perhaps you'd like to borrow their semantic matching technology and bidding platform to acquire some customers or make a little money on AdSense; that's not too difficult either and plenty of people have made millions on the back of both. Just want to make your mark on the web? There are many neat little things your average web-savvy teenager can get creative with like their web fonts. Their free code hosting and tutorials go a lot further than just helping you use Google services more effectively. Show me a successful online startup which has never used anything from Google and I'll show you a liar. But yeah, web hosting is a little further from Google's core business than Amazon's or Rackspace's. Does that make them elitist and irrelevant? Tell that to the millions of people running searches every day with less barrier to overcome than buying a book from Amazon
- zmitri 15y ago
  It's not about web hosting, in this artcle "interesting" is about enabling developers to leverage technology and learn from the ground up. From your username it seems as though you would not be in a position to compare the merits of appengine vs. aws, but as someone who has used both platforms I totally agree with the article. Maybe "working" at Google has a bit more "allure" to notahacker, but he is right on that Amazon has totally empowered a new generation of engineers in a way that Google has not -- engineers who want to build on their on, not just sit on fun APIs.
  - notahacker 15y ago
    For the record, despite the fact that I choose to celebrate my inability to hack my way out of a paper bag with my moniker, I've experimented with both AppEngine and AWS (albeit Heroku-flavoured AWS). So I'll happily agree that when it comes to hosting web applications, Amazon has a much broader offering and actually attempts customer service, but I pointed out a whole load of other ways Google services empower independent developers. Including building operating systems, browers and other types of platforms which aren't on Amazon's radar. To deny that Google offers developers much because Amazon's core competency AWS beats AppEngine beta to a bloody pulp is like saying Amazon offers consumers nothing because the experimental public A9 search engine bombed.
    - zmitri 15y ago
      Building new browsers and OSes give developers more choice, it doesn't change the game. AWS has completely changed the game. The only thing I could think of Google doing to be on the same level, is opening up a search api (even at a cost). Heroku does not offer you even close to the same flexibility as AWS does, but it's still a pretty sweet product in the same way that app engine is.
      - Locke1689 15y ago
        Android seems to have obviously changed the game in mobile development.
jmillikin 15y ago
They decide that you are an elite engineer primarily based on whether you went to an elite school. Elite code. Elite engineers. Elite schools. Elite company. How very elitist. This whole "Google is elitist" meme is silly. They hired me as an SRE, and yet I didn't attend high school, went to a state college, and had something like a 3.2 GPA. Stop being so afraid of failure that you never try to succeed.
- Newkleer 15y ago
  The implication here is that working for google is success. Working for someone else is only success if you're afraid of failure.
  - jmillikin 15y ago
    Working on something challenging and rewarding is success. Refusing to apply to a challenging/rewarding job because one's afraid of being rejected is failure. Defending one's choice with appeals to "elitism" is justification.
  - 0x12 15y ago
    It takes lots of different kinds of people to make a success. If the company you start can't hire people because everybody thinks like you do you too will fail. The attitude that you can't be 'successful' in life unless you start a company is really out of touch with reality, I'd argue that it takes all kinds for everybody to even have a chance at achieving their definition of success, and people that do not achieve your definition of success are not automatically failures.
- plinkplonk 15y ago
  "This whole "Google is elitist" meme is silly. They hired me as an SRE, and yet I didn't attend high school, went to a state college, and had something like a 3.2 GPA." Would changing the OP's sentence to "Google is mostly elitist" help? (Genuine Question). You might (please note the emphasis on 'might') be the exception that proves the rule. Here in Bangalore, for example, it is known that Google has a strong bias towards IIT grads and academic performance. Whether such a strong preference for such schools/academic scores etc should be labelled "elitist" is a different debate. Fwiw, my gut feel is that if you are a strong enough engineer, you can get Google to override this bias.
antics 15y ago
Maybe Amazon is more interesting than Google, but the only thing you have demonstrated here, OP, is that it is not you who will be demonstrating this for us. And the real miracle of your screed is that there are dozens of issues that you could have raised, but by God almighty and all that is holy under the sun, you have managed to avoid every single one of them, except one. And the one you got is not important by itself. Let's have some examples. You write, "They decide that you are an elite engineer primarily based on whether you went to an elite school." Yeah, OP? According to who? You? Maybe there's a place where it's acceptable to get up and air vague, unsubstantiated conjecture about something you don't understand, but in the real world, you have to qualify your argumentation. I might add that even if it is the case that Google hires primarily from prestigious universities, you are not accounting for the fact that they could actually just be better on average. There are other examples, too, but rather than point out the withered editorial you serve up for literally the first 2/5ths of the article, I think I'll do us all a favor by pointing out that your first actual fact is that Amazon makes tools -- and that this fact appears more than halfway into the article. And more critically, that it is delivered without any real impacts. Even if Amazon delivers more tools, WHO CARES? HOW DOES THIS DEMONSTRATE YOUR POINT? And actually, while I'm here, what IS your point? Strong claims demand strong evidence, and if you're going to drop a line like "But the world has changed, and Google can’t seem to keep up", then you'd better damn well be prepared to back it up.
- plinkplonk 15y ago
  You probably have a reasonable argument somewhere in there. Less "shouting" (use of block letters), attacking the poster (vs his argument) and empty rhetorical flourishes ("but by God almighty and all that is holy under the sun") would help the rest of us actually understand your argument. I think the useful bits of your comment can be summed up as (your sentence) "Strong claims demand strong evidence" without all the accompanying histrionics.
  - antics 15y ago
    Yes, you're probably right. I'm a classically trained debater, and I tend to talk and write the way I was trained. Also I tend to post only when I'm annoyed, and I turn more into a speechmaker the more I get annoyed. It's maybe a weakness and I'll consider making a conscious effort if other people seem to agree. EDIT: I'm going to mark this as the first time in my life that people in general disapprove of honest personal inventory. What it is that they would have rather heard (a lie?) is unclear.
stmartin 15y ago
The only complaint against Google I've got is their PaaS nature vs Amazon's IaaS nature. One could argue PaaS is "better", but for us geeks, nothing beats absolute control that IaaS offers.
d2 15y ago
You're linking to commercial services touting them as examples of Amazon being more open than Google? Services linked to are: MapReduce, S3, EC2, SQS, SES and MechTurk. sigh
- zobzu 15y ago
  I think what the article means here is that with Amazon, you can just use it. It's not free or open.. source but you can just access it, understand how it works and use it. Google just tout they have XX and ZZ but only so-called elite can play with it or even just know more about it. It might end up being crap, no one else than Google engineers will know.
  - rryan 15y ago
    > understand how it works So... care to tell me how EC2 works? :P The only way you are going to learn how these proprietary systems work are by working at Google or Amazon. What makes the EC2, S3, etc. APIs different from AppEngine or the 100s of other Google APIs there are? They're all just APIs to proprietary systems (well, except when writing apps for Chrome and Android). You are learning "how they work" only in the most superficial meaning of the phrase.
ahmetalpbalkan 15y ago
Fact: In Seattle, some of Microsoft employees start working for Amazon for 1 or 2 years, then they want to come back.
bambax 15y ago
There are two different angles in this story: Google is "elitist" and Amazon empowers its users much more than Google. The elitist part is, I think, irrelevant, difficult to prove and ambiguous. "Google has invented something very cool, but they won’t show it to you unless they think you are among the world’s elite engineers." Would it be better if Google was only willing to show the best of its technology only to beer buddies of the janitor? Then it wouldn't be "elitist" (maybe) but it still would be pointless. The problem here is that Google's blog post does not discuss how "petasorts" benefit Google's users; an engineering feat, certainly, but why should we care? This sounds a little like Microsoft R&D of which very little ever came out (at least in proportion to the hundreds of billions poured into it). In contrast, what Amazon does is always, always geared toward its users / customers. The thing is, Amazon HAS customers, and serves them well (they answer to email, even pick up the phone). I don't think Google thinks about their users as customers.
- ggchappell 15y ago
  > I don't think Google thinks about their users as customers. Why should they? A customer is someone who gives you money. Amazon is in the business of doing things for users in exchange for money; Amazon's customers are its users. Google, in contrast, is in the business of doing things for users to get them to look at ads. Google's customers are advertisers. I'm a heavy user of Google's services. But I've never given them a cent. I'm not a Google customer; I don't see why I should be treated like one.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    Further along those lines, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971102 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971102 which links to http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/07/why-carol-bartz-was-fired/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/07/why-carol-bartz-was-fired/ which has this gem: "To answer, we need to be careful in recognizing that the customer is the advertiser, not the user. Like in all advertising business models, the user is the product." You are only as valuable as your eyeballs. But Google, like any other large organization, isn't intrinsically elitist or evil or munificent or dysfunctional. These example adjectives are emergent properties of a company culture. GM is an interesting example of a company working hard to change its culture and by doing so change some of the adjectives people might use when describing them.
danmaz74 15y ago
How can you compare a company as an employer to a different company as a service provider? It's pretty obvious to me that for Amazon their public cloud computing offer is much more strategic than it is for Google, so if you want that kind of service AWS is most likely more interesting than GAE. But that's about that.
pigbucket 15y ago
I recognize that this is a soundbite version of recent history and tangential to the main point of the article, but just for the sake of contrarianism: Google is the company that pulled out of China in opposition to government-sponsored censorship; Amazon is the company that cut Wikileaks loose in response to government-requested censorship. There's more to judging a company's "interestingness" than its apparent antipathy to elitism.
- 0x12 15y ago
  Google is the company that first played ball with the Chinese government first and pulled out after the Chinese hacked them. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8455712.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8455712.stm It had nothing to do with 'government-sponsored censorship', in fact, google showed different results to Chinese nationals on the other side of the line and the rest of the world for specific queries for a long time.
  - watty 15y ago
    The hacks were an attempt at surveillance, most likely from the government. "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china...
- danssig 15y ago
  Google is the company that claimed to pull out of China and didn't until they got hacked. They're also the company that just pulled a particularly sneaky bait-n-switch on it's paying customer base. Amazon is no angel but neither is Google. They're both public for-profit companies and nothing else.
  - sixtofour 15y ago
    "They're both public for-profit companies and nothing else." This is the only view, and the only thing approaching a value judgement, that can apply to a large (enough) company. It's like befriending a wolf in the wild. It may lick your hand, and bark at danger, but it could easily take your hand off and no one would blame it for being true to its nature. In fact you'd be chastised for not treating it with the caution it demands.
jrockway 15y ago
I don't see the difference. Google pays smart people to write proprietary software that they sell users access to. Amazon pays smart people to write proprietary software that they sell users access to. The difference is that the author read a Google recruiting ad and is comparing it to Amazon's publicly-available products. Yeah, they're different. Users don't care about petasort. Recently-graduated PhDs looking for work do. And that's who that copy is targeting. "Nothing to see here: move along."
- reemrevnivek 15y ago
  No, you're missing the point. Google pays smart people to write proprietary software that they don't sell users access to. Are you confusing the sale of ads with the sale of the software that allows the ads to be effective? Google's sale of their products would be analogous to Amazon allowing sellers other than Amazon.com to sell stuff through their web store. And they do! The point of the article is that Amazon also sells the web store itself. Google has interesting, proprietary software, but they don't sell search engines, sorting tools, or scalable web hosting.
  - mdwrigh2 15y ago
    > Google has interesting, proprietary software, but they don't sell search engines http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/ http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/ > , sorting tools Okay, so they don't sell sorting tools. But to be fair, they've published a number of papers on different technologies which have furthered the creation of a number of tools, including sorting tools. > or scalable web hosting. http://code.google.com/appengine/ http://code.google.com/appengine/
swah 15y ago
Not having Amazon (either as the find-everything, ship-in-one-day store with great customer service, or the webservices) is one of those things that reminds me I'm in a third world country.
jimfl 15y ago
Check, check, and check. Amazon also takes Visa and MasterCard.
ender7 15y ago
(disclaimer: I work for Google) I really don't understand this post. The author's argument seems to be: 1. Google won't share its trade secrets with me 2. ??? 3. Hey guys, I hear Amazon has some great cloud services you can pay for! Amazon provides cloud services. Google doesn't (except for the GAE). I fail to see how this fact becomes personally insulting to this guy.
- mcantelon 15y ago
  Yeah, I enjoyed the irony of the phrase "Its like they are stoned and watching the world pass them by in a daze". Android? G+? This guy doesn't get that Google isn't focussed on cloud computing as a product (App Engine never seemed anything more than a token offering to me).
abtinf 15y ago
Followup: Openness is Overrated http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974037 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974037
mark_l_watson 15y ago
Although I am generally a Google fan (I still like AppEngine, even with higher costs, I use GMail + GDocs + Calendar hourly in my consulting business, and I enjoy G+) I wrote a blog a few months ago rating Amazon as a more interesting company than Google, technology-wise. Part of it is that Amazon is not a black box. I have read most of the relavent papers published by Googlers and Amazonians, and I feel like Amazon technologies are so much more approachable and generally useful. Top level: both Google and Amazon have developed great technology that they needed to run their companies and then decided to make a subset of their technologies available to outside developers and companies. Still Google does some very nice things for developers like Google Code, and little things like releasing Wave in a Box (which is great!) when they announced the termination of Wave services.

209 points by abtinf 15y ago

GAE was more interesting to me because it promised to be efficient and scalable if I learned their platform. Turns out that MBAs uploading django onto it are getting more reasonable cost increases than my custom built apps. It was interesting. But if learning these interesting systems doesn't actually result in efficiency - as demonstrated by the numbers showing up in my billing panel - then they aren't really interesting at all. I'm not interesting in pointless hoop jumping. So now I'm learning how to port my GAE app to EC2 or maybe even Heroku (if I can reconcile that with the fact that I've spent the last two years persuading my Heroku friends that its expensive compared to GAE).

skrebbel 15y ago
> MBAs uploading django onto it Wow, your MBAs got skills!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

magicalist 15y ago

I'm finding myself really interested in color spaces recently. Maybe you forgot to title this "I like Amazon Web Services, not App Engine"?

notahacker 15y ago

Is it just me that doesn't grok any argument at all here; there are many criticisms that could be levelled at Google but this apples and oranges comparison is a million miles wide of the mark Google wants the best engineers to work for them; I'm pretty sure the same applies to Amazon. They're not going to let you near the bottom of the AWS stack without you proving that you're towards the extreme of the smart side of the bell curve and signing an employment contract with them. Amazon provides its platform to anyone that wants to develop on it: last time I checked there was no obstacle in the way of signing up for AppEngine, using Google's many APIs to build a sexy looking searchable dynamic local social mobile website which you can then distribute via their webstore, or as a plugin for their browser or app on their mobile operating system. Maps are really cool and useful for that sort of thing. Perhaps you'd like to borrow their semantic matching technology and bidding platform to acquire some customers or make a little money on AdSense; that's not too difficult either and plenty of people have made millions on the back of both. Just want to make your mark on the web? There are many neat little things your average web-savvy teenager can get creative with like their web fonts. Their free code hosting and tutorials go a lot further than just helping you use Google services more effectively. Show me a successful online startup which has never used anything from Google and I'll show you a liar. But yeah, web hosting is a little further from Google's core business than Amazon's or Rackspace's. Does that make them elitist and irrelevant? Tell that to the millions of people running searches every day with less barrier to overcome than buying a book from Amazon

zmitri 15y ago
It's not about web hosting, in this artcle "interesting" is about enabling developers to leverage technology and learn from the ground up. From your username it seems as though you would not be in a position to compare the merits of appengine vs. aws, but as someone who has used both platforms I totally agree with the article. Maybe "working" at Google has a bit more "allure" to notahacker, but he is right on that Amazon has totally empowered a new generation of engineers in a way that Google has not -- engineers who want to build on their on, not just sit on fun APIs.
- notahacker 15y ago
  For the record, despite the fact that I choose to celebrate my inability to hack my way out of a paper bag with my moniker, I've experimented with both AppEngine and AWS (albeit Heroku-flavoured AWS). So I'll happily agree that when it comes to hosting web applications, Amazon has a much broader offering and actually attempts customer service, but I pointed out a whole load of other ways Google services empower independent developers. Including building operating systems, browers and other types of platforms which aren't on Amazon's radar. To deny that Google offers developers much because Amazon's core competency AWS beats AppEngine beta to a bloody pulp is like saying Amazon offers consumers nothing because the experimental public A9 search engine bombed.
  - zmitri 15y ago
    Building new browsers and OSes give developers more choice, it doesn't change the game. AWS has completely changed the game. The only thing I could think of Google doing to be on the same level, is opening up a search api (even at a cost). Heroku does not offer you even close to the same flexibility as AWS does, but it's still a pretty sweet product in the same way that app engine is.
    - Locke1689 15y ago
      Android seems to have obviously changed the game in mobile development.

jmillikin 15y ago

They decide that you are an elite engineer primarily based on whether you went to an elite school. Elite code. Elite engineers. Elite schools. Elite company. How very elitist. This whole "Google is elitist" meme is silly. They hired me as an SRE, and yet I didn't attend high school, went to a state college, and had something like a 3.2 GPA. Stop being so afraid of failure that you never try to succeed.

Newkleer 15y ago
The implication here is that working for google is success. Working for someone else is only success if you're afraid of failure.
- jmillikin 15y ago
  Working on something challenging and rewarding is success. Refusing to apply to a challenging/rewarding job because one's afraid of being rejected is failure. Defending one's choice with appeals to "elitism" is justification.
- 0x12 15y ago
  It takes lots of different kinds of people to make a success. If the company you start can't hire people because everybody thinks like you do you too will fail. The attitude that you can't be 'successful' in life unless you start a company is really out of touch with reality, I'd argue that it takes all kinds for everybody to even have a chance at achieving their definition of success, and people that do not achieve your definition of success are not automatically failures.
plinkplonk 15y ago
"This whole "Google is elitist" meme is silly. They hired me as an SRE, and yet I didn't attend high school, went to a state college, and had something like a 3.2 GPA." Would changing the OP's sentence to "Google is mostly elitist" help? (Genuine Question). You might (please note the emphasis on 'might') be the exception that proves the rule. Here in Bangalore, for example, it is known that Google has a strong bias towards IIT grads and academic performance. Whether such a strong preference for such schools/academic scores etc should be labelled "elitist" is a different debate. Fwiw, my gut feel is that if you are a strong enough engineer, you can get Google to override this bias.

antics 15y ago

Maybe Amazon is more interesting than Google, but the only thing you have demonstrated here, OP, is that it is not you who will be demonstrating this for us. And the real miracle of your screed is that there are dozens of issues that you could have raised, but by God almighty and all that is holy under the sun, you have managed to avoid every single one of them, except one. And the one you got is not important by itself. Let's have some examples. You write, "They decide that you are an elite engineer primarily based on whether you went to an elite school." Yeah, OP? According to who? You? Maybe there's a place where it's acceptable to get up and air vague, unsubstantiated conjecture about something you don't understand, but in the real world, you have to qualify your argumentation. I might add that even if it is the case that Google hires primarily from prestigious universities, you are not accounting for the fact that they could actually just be better on average. There are other examples, too, but rather than point out the withered editorial you serve up for literally the first 2/5ths of the article, I think I'll do us all a favor by pointing out that your first actual fact is that Amazon makes tools -- and that this fact appears more than halfway into the article. And more critically, that it is delivered without any real impacts. Even if Amazon delivers more tools, WHO CARES? HOW DOES THIS DEMONSTRATE YOUR POINT? And actually, while I'm here, what IS your point? Strong claims demand strong evidence, and if you're going to drop a line like "But the world has changed, and Google can’t seem to keep up", then you'd better damn well be prepared to back it up.

plinkplonk 15y ago
You probably have a reasonable argument somewhere in there. Less "shouting" (use of block letters), attacking the poster (vs his argument) and empty rhetorical flourishes ("but by God almighty and all that is holy under the sun") would help the rest of us actually understand your argument. I think the useful bits of your comment can be summed up as (your sentence) "Strong claims demand strong evidence" without all the accompanying histrionics.
- antics 15y ago
  Yes, you're probably right. I'm a classically trained debater, and I tend to talk and write the way I was trained. Also I tend to post only when I'm annoyed, and I turn more into a speechmaker the more I get annoyed. It's maybe a weakness and I'll consider making a conscious effort if other people seem to agree. EDIT: I'm going to mark this as the first time in my life that people in general disapprove of honest personal inventory. What it is that they would have rather heard (a lie?) is unclear.

stmartin 15y ago

The only complaint against Google I've got is their PaaS nature vs Amazon's IaaS nature. One could argue PaaS is "better", but for us geeks, nothing beats absolute control that IaaS offers.

d2 15y ago

You're linking to commercial services touting them as examples of Amazon being more open than Google? Services linked to are: MapReduce, S3, EC2, SQS, SES and MechTurk. sigh

zobzu 15y ago
I think what the article means here is that with Amazon, you can just use it. It's not free or open.. source but you can just access it, understand how it works and use it. Google just tout they have XX and ZZ but only so-called elite can play with it or even just know more about it. It might end up being crap, no one else than Google engineers will know.
- rryan 15y ago
  > understand how it works So... care to tell me how EC2 works? :P The only way you are going to learn how these proprietary systems work are by working at Google or Amazon. What makes the EC2, S3, etc. APIs different from AppEngine or the 100s of other Google APIs there are? They're all just APIs to proprietary systems (well, except when writing apps for Chrome and Android). You are learning "how they work" only in the most superficial meaning of the phrase.

ahmetalpbalkan 15y ago

Fact: In Seattle, some of Microsoft employees start working for Amazon for 1 or 2 years, then they want to come back.

bambax 15y ago

There are two different angles in this story: Google is "elitist" and Amazon empowers its users much more than Google. The elitist part is, I think, irrelevant, difficult to prove and ambiguous. "Google has invented something very cool, but they won’t show it to you unless they think you are among the world’s elite engineers." Would it be better if Google was only willing to show the best of its technology only to beer buddies of the janitor? Then it wouldn't be "elitist" (maybe) but it still would be pointless. The problem here is that Google's blog post does not discuss how "petasorts" benefit Google's users; an engineering feat, certainly, but why should we care? This sounds a little like Microsoft R&D of which very little ever came out (at least in proportion to the hundreds of billions poured into it). In contrast, what Amazon does is always, always geared toward its users / customers. The thing is, Amazon HAS customers, and serves them well (they answer to email, even pick up the phone). I don't think Google thinks about their users as customers.

ggchappell 15y ago
> I don't think Google thinks about their users as customers. Why should they? A customer is someone who gives you money. Amazon is in the business of doing things for users in exchange for money; Amazon's customers are its users. Google, in contrast, is in the business of doing things for users to get them to look at ads. Google's customers are advertisers. I'm a heavy user of Google's services. But I've never given them a cent. I'm not a Google customer; I don't see why I should be treated like one.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  Further along those lines, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971102 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971102 which links to http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/07/why-carol-bartz-was-fired/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/07/why-carol-bartz-was-fired/ which has this gem: "To answer, we need to be careful in recognizing that the customer is the advertiser, not the user. Like in all advertising business models, the user is the product." You are only as valuable as your eyeballs. But Google, like any other large organization, isn't intrinsically elitist or evil or munificent or dysfunctional. These example adjectives are emergent properties of a company culture. GM is an interesting example of a company working hard to change its culture and by doing so change some of the adjectives people might use when describing them.

danmaz74 15y ago

How can you compare a company as an employer to a different company as a service provider? It's pretty obvious to me that for Amazon their public cloud computing offer is much more strategic than it is for Google, so if you want that kind of service AWS is most likely more interesting than GAE. But that's about that.

pigbucket 15y ago

I recognize that this is a soundbite version of recent history and tangential to the main point of the article, but just for the sake of contrarianism: Google is the company that pulled out of China in opposition to government-sponsored censorship; Amazon is the company that cut Wikileaks loose in response to government-requested censorship. There's more to judging a company's "interestingness" than its apparent antipathy to elitism.

0x12 15y ago
Google is the company that first played ball with the Chinese government first and pulled out after the Chinese hacked them. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8455712.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8455712.stm It had nothing to do with 'government-sponsored censorship', in fact, google showed different results to Chinese nationals on the other side of the line and the rest of the world for specific queries for a long time.
- watty 15y ago
  The hacks were an attempt at surveillance, most likely from the government. "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china...
danssig 15y ago
Google is the company that claimed to pull out of China and didn't until they got hacked. They're also the company that just pulled a particularly sneaky bait-n-switch on it's paying customer base. Amazon is no angel but neither is Google. They're both public for-profit companies and nothing else.
- sixtofour 15y ago
  "They're both public for-profit companies and nothing else." This is the only view, and the only thing approaching a value judgement, that can apply to a large (enough) company. It's like befriending a wolf in the wild. It may lick your hand, and bark at danger, but it could easily take your hand off and no one would blame it for being true to its nature. In fact you'd be chastised for not treating it with the caution it demands.

jrockway 15y ago

I don't see the difference. Google pays smart people to write proprietary software that they sell users access to. Amazon pays smart people to write proprietary software that they sell users access to. The difference is that the author read a Google recruiting ad and is comparing it to Amazon's publicly-available products. Yeah, they're different. Users don't care about petasort. Recently-graduated PhDs looking for work do. And that's who that copy is targeting. "Nothing to see here: move along."

reemrevnivek 15y ago
No, you're missing the point. Google pays smart people to write proprietary software that they don't sell users access to. Are you confusing the sale of ads with the sale of the software that allows the ads to be effective? Google's sale of their products would be analogous to Amazon allowing sellers other than Amazon.com to sell stuff through their web store. And they do! The point of the article is that Amazon also sells the web store itself. Google has interesting, proprietary software, but they don't sell search engines, sorting tools, or scalable web hosting.
- mdwrigh2 15y ago
  > Google has interesting, proprietary software, but they don't sell search engines http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/ http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/ > , sorting tools Okay, so they don't sell sorting tools. But to be fair, they've published a number of papers on different technologies which have furthered the creation of a number of tools, including sorting tools. > or scalable web hosting. http://code.google.com/appengine/ http://code.google.com/appengine/

swah 15y ago

Not having Amazon (either as the find-everything, ship-in-one-day store with great customer service, or the webservices) is one of those things that reminds me I'm in a third world country.

jimfl 15y ago

Check, check, and check. Amazon also takes Visa and MasterCard.

ender7 15y ago

(disclaimer: I work for Google) I really don't understand this post. The author's argument seems to be: 1. Google won't share its trade secrets with me 2. ??? 3. Hey guys, I hear Amazon has some great cloud services you can pay for! Amazon provides cloud services. Google doesn't (except for the GAE). I fail to see how this fact becomes personally insulting to this guy.

mcantelon 15y ago
Yeah, I enjoyed the irony of the phrase "Its like they are stoned and watching the world pass them by in a daze". Android? G+? This guy doesn't get that Google isn't focussed on cloud computing as a product (App Engine never seemed anything more than a token offering to me).

abtinf 15y ago

Followup: Openness is Overrated http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974037 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974037

mark_l_watson 15y ago

Although I am generally a Google fan (I still like AppEngine, even with higher costs, I use GMail + GDocs + Calendar hourly in my consulting business, and I enjoy G+) I wrote a blog a few months ago rating Amazon as a more interesting company than Google, technology-wise. Part of it is that Amazon is not a black box. I have read most of the relavent papers published by Googlers and Amazonians, and I feel like Amazon technologies are so much more approachable and generally useful. Top level: both Google and Amazon have developed great technology that they needed to run their companies and then decided to make a subset of their technologies available to outside developers and companies. Still Google does some very nice things for developers like Google Code, and little things like releasing Wave in a Box (which is great!) when they announced the termination of Wave services.