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Why is cloud a loss for Google but a cash cow for Amazon?
by oneoff786 4y ago
Why is cloud a loss for Google but a cash cow for Amazon?
- gerbler 4y agoLots of capex
- Kstarek 4y agoBecause Google is playing catch up and needs to pay higher salaries to poach from MSFT and AMZN and also pay much more for infra than what Amazon paid for theirs initially.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoGoogle has been "playing catch up" for a decade now. They also pay less than Amazon (source levels.fyi)
- scottyah 4y agoFrom what I hear they paw software engineers less, but find it harder to attract sales personnel, as it’s easier to sell the industry leader (IBM, Oracle vs ???). No sources, just some posts a few months ago.
- arebop 4y agoGoogle does not pay less than Amazon (source levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Salesforce&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Salesforce&tra...). I have heard people claim that Amazon pays more and by that they mean that if you hold your Amazon stock until vesting, it appreciates so much that it ends up being worth more than whatever the Google grant would have been worth. But then you have to ask if the relative performance of the stocks will remain stable over time despite having changed recently, and factor in differences in employee churn and so on.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoThey pay about 100,000 less. Its widely known, not sure why you are arguing this. Amazon also raised their paybands massively, so a blanket comparison doesnt reflect reality. Look at individual data over the last year or so. Google also downlevels, so comparing levels makes less sense, compare years of experience instead
- jnwatson 4y agoBack last July, AWS couldn’t come close to what Meta or Google could offer when I was looking.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mandeepj 4y ago> Amazon also raised their paybands massively that $350k base limit is top of the band, not everyone walking inside the door is going to get that. A friend of mind got an offer from AWS about a month ago, his base was offered $180k
- eclipxe 4y agoVery wrong.
- ra7 4y agoWhat does Google still need to catch up on in cloud? Building products/services? Sales? AFAIK, they have comparable cloud services to most AWS/Azure offerings.
- bamboozled 4y agoTrust for one thing. They just cut off customers services with line of recourse. Also shut down products with little warning.
- ra7 4y agoI don't think shutting down products applies to GCP services. Even if it did, it doesn't explain the $858M loss. They are spending big on something to "catch up", I'm just not sure what it is.
- RandomBK 4y agoIIRC it's mostly incentives for large companies to jump ship
- ushakov 4y ago> shutting down products applies to GCP services they regularly deprecate old API versions in favour of new ones, which are not backwards compatible and usually more expensive any time Google Cloud APIs change you have to update your code and they break stuff, introduce bugs more often that you'd expect and prioritize new features over fixes (see bugtracker for confirmation) this is why i'm never again touching GCP
- colinmhayes 4y agoMostly I think it’s just acquiring customers. The big cloud providers go to great lengths to lock their customers in, so convincing them to switch is hard. Requires a much better product which seems pretty much impossible against aws and azure or a much cheaper price.
- levi-turner 4y ago
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoIIUC, Google w/o cloud or YouTube handles more network requests, storage, and bandwidth than Amazon + AWS by a large margin. They don't need to "catch up" on infra. They need to catch up on their product offering.
- Melatonic 4y agoThey also offer insanely cheap deals to nonprofits and education for both GSuite (or whatever they call it these days) and GCP. Totally makes sense why they do it but I have to imagine its a huge loss on paper. They also might be building more actual datacenters and doing so in a high end / environmentally friendly way whereas perhaps Amazon has already done a lot of those investments in previous years?
- Godel_unicode 4y ago>… insanely cheap deals to nonprofits… Amazon and Microsoft both do that as well.
- lucasbm 4y agoProbably because Amazon is better at retail sales. For larger companies both Amazon and Google give an enormous amount of incentives to secure the accounts, so they have lower margins. Where they thrive is with smaller and medium businesses. Amazon is better at the market of selling to the average joe.
- the_duke 4y agoMicrosoft is also good at upselling Azure through existing customer relationships, and almost every company is a Microsoft customer. Sales also just isn't in Googles DNA. It's an uphill battle for Google.
- ghaff 4y agoAWS was actually able to add enterprise sales after realizing it needed to. Not clearly Google has done nearly as good a job.
- HeyItsMatt 4y agoGoogle has a cash cow and isn't hungry. Their employees can half-arse the rest of their business and still be confident they'll get paid at the end of the week. Amazon's retail arm bled when AWS was started, and still bleeds. Success is a matter of urgency.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoAWS early mover advantage?
- epolanski 4y agoThis. In medium sized companies no one cares how expensive is the cloud bill. What matters is getting the infrastructure and any devop and many devs are already used to AWS so it is chosen by default.
- loeg 4y agoBecause Google is absolutely awful at Cloud and they have to subsidize heavily to attract customers.
- echelon 4y agoTheir cloud platform is fantastic if you're trying to stay on vanilla k8s and standard managed DBs without getting into vendor lock-in territory. Their management UI is an order of magnitude better than AWS garbage. It's clean, informational, and easily navigable. Spanner great, but I'm not using it for my startup.
- scarface74 4y agoAnyone who says using K8s on any cloud provider prevents “lock in” has never done a large scale migration. You’re always “locked in” to your infrastructure at scale.
- dmitriid 4y ago> Their management UI is an order of magnitude better than AWS garbage. It's clean, informational, and easily navigable. I've never seen someone calling a glacially slow, inconsistent, cannot-even-display-graphs-90%-of-the-time, information-hidden-behind-multiple-steps abomination of GCP Console that.
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoA lot of the cost structure is ~fixed (and high). It's pretty much the ultimate scale game.