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This analysis just feels totally off to me. Google didn't miss anything with MapReduce and TensorFlow. So what that Hadoop and PyTorch came out and became open

This analysis just feels totally off to me. Google didn't miss anything with MapReduce and TensorFlow. So what that Hadoop and PyTorch came out and became open source favorites? It's not like that had any significant negative business impact to Google. On the flip side, Google's open sourcing of Kubernetes did win the container orchestration "war" (RIP Mesos), and it's not like that brought them any great benefits. I agree with another commenter, where Google missed the boat was cloud. Ironically, AppEngine came out pretty early in 2008, but its original incarnation was much too "Google-specific". Google just didn't have the corporate DNA to understand that, sure, Datastore can allow infinite horizontal scalability, but most people don't want to deal with eventual consistency, and they just want a plain-old SQL DB. It took Google a long time to come around to understand how other businesses use their infrastructure.

acdha 3y ago
AppEngine also hit the classic Google problem of missing attention to detail. I used it for a couple of projects in 2008/2009 and it just wasn’t competitive - cold starts were painful, you’d hit all of these gaps in features or random bugs in the tooling, etc. and while Datastore might scale it was consistently much slower than any mainstream SQL database so you really had to need that scaling. That was the first project which trained me not to use Google products. I remember reporting by a ton of stuff and then never hearing back and things never improving until much (multiple years?) later when I’d stopped using it. I was profoundly unsurprised when AWS ate their lunch.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > AppEngine also hit the classic Google problem of missing attention to detail. Amen, amen, amen. This is so frustrating to me because in general I really like GCP as a platform, and I think they're doing great things with stuff like Cloud Run. Case in point, I like Firebase a lot, and I think Firebase Auth (aka Google Identity Platform) is a great product. But it took them about 2.5 years between releasing their initial support for a second factor, which was originally SMS only, and allowing a TOTP (e.g. Google Authenticator/Auth) 2nd factor. And they still don't support "remember this device" functionality, so every time someone logs in they always need to enter the 2nd factor. I literally can't think of any major site (especially Google's own) that doesn't support "remember this device", and yet it just must be a detail that's not "important enough" to get someone at Google a promotion.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Yeah, the updates I’m still getting on parity-with-AWS tickets from before the pandemic just reminds me that nobody at Google gets promoted for removing warts. They did close my textbook example of that but it took half a decade to implement HTTP to HTTPS redirects, which basically every large customer wants to make compliance easier: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904733 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904733
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Wow, that issue thread basically shows everything that's wrong with Google when it comes to dealing with business customers, though I do give them credit that it seems to have slightly improved near the end there: at least a Google PM was giving status updates and engaging with the commenters - before that for years it was just crickets. Here is my similar (though not as long) example - point-in-time-recovery on postgres: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/78448400 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/78448400. Interestingly, it had the same problem with 0 communication from a Google PM until early 2020, so maybe they hired someone at that time who convinced them you can't treat business customers the same way you do consumers.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jmugan 3y ago
  I had the same experience with AppEngine. I kept hitting snags and just couldn't get them solved so I gave up on it and moved to AWS.
  - carom 3y ago
    Exact opposite experience here. I love AppEngine and can't get Beanstalk to work for the life of me.
marcinzm 3y ago
In theory good kubernetes integration makes GCP have a competitive advantage.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
paulddraper 3y ago
K8 definitely helped Google Cloud. Sure it wasn't enough alone to outlet outplay AWS, but Google would have been worse off without it
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Really? To turn the question on its head a bit, Amazon has EKS, and they don't seem to be any worse off for having not invented it.
  - harpratap 3y ago
    GKE in general seems to be doing better than EKS though. They have a lot of things right and EKS seems to be playing catch-up. For example if you look at any Multi-cluster Kubernetes setup by AWS it's just a giant duct-tape rather than a ground-up solution. GKE worked on fundamentals first like multi-cluster endpoints, multi-cluster services, multi-cluster ingress, multi-cluster config-sync and now bringing it all together under GKE Enterprise.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Thanks, this is helpful context, most appreciated.
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      I did a migration to GKE at a previous company and it was basically great to work with. At the time we had a few teething issues with the most edge-casey bits of our system, to do with getting ingress and CDNs to work well together I think. The end result was a little more manual Terraforming than would have been ideal, but it all worked, and I believe the improvement needed from GCP was on their roadmap and came a few months later. GKE (with Autopilot) is firmly set in my "day 1 toolbox" if I were to start a new company, assuming K8S was the right tech choice.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    EKS came years later.
kccqzy 3y ago
I believe the issue goes much deeper. Google itself did not have a scalable SQL DB when App Engine first came out. Spanner was still being designed. Even if Google understood that customers wanted a SQL DB, it could not give them that.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  But lost people don’t need a scalable database. They need Postgres for 200 rows. Or really just SQLite but over the network.
- barrkel 3y ago
  Google was running MySQL in different flavours and configurations before Spanner. I suspect strategy tax (knowing Spanner was coming along eventually) might have been a reason for not offering that as a managed option though.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Which actually goes to the heart of the issue. Who cares what Google had? MySQL and Postgres existed - Amazon RDS first came out in 2009, and you could run DBs on EC2 before that. Google famously uses lots of custom versions of infrastructure software while the rest of the world uses something else. Obviously that has served then extremely well, but the rest of the world wants stuff they are familiar with. It really took Google years to fully grasp that.
Animats 3y ago
MapReduce helped solve a huge internal problem for Google - how to update the index dynamically. Originally, index updates were batch jobs that took days to run. But MapReduce isn't the solution to that problem. It's just the orchestration for the algorithm. It was figuring out how to partition that matrix inversion that was the hard part. Most of Google's problems in B2B reflect that the organization has little concept of customer service, in the sense of serving customers. It's not the technology. The current problem with AI for Google is that the good stuff costs a bit too much to give away with search. That problem may be solved, or evaded. Most searches or questions don't need a large language model. I expect to see systems where you ask a question, and if it's hard, you get something like "That's a hard question. Give me a minute to work on that. Meanwhile, here's a word from our sponsor."
- spinningslate 3y ago
  > Most of Google's problems in B2B reflect that the organization has little concept of customer service, in the sense of serving customers. It's not the technology. This, exactly. Google is fantastic at research, great at development. It's terrible at product. Or, specifically, all the bits of product that aren't R&D. MapReduce, Tensorflow and Kubernetes are all examples of technical successes that Google has spawned. None is a product. You can't buy them, buy support, or, you know, actually talk to someone if something goes wrong. That's why Google cloud has failed so far. It's not the tech; big G can go toe to toe with Amazon and MS on that. It's that enterprises want contracts and support and relationship managers and all that stuff. That just doesn't seem to be in Google's DNA. Unless they can adress that, they're not going to win with big org customers. They might win the startups - where the customers are themselves techies who are OK with self supporting, looking up Stackoverflow, asking ChatGPT, etc. But unless they can address the people angle, I don't see Vertex gaining meaningful traction against Amazon or OpenAI/MS.
  - ctippett 3y ago
    Make no mistake, Google has a legion of Account Managers, Customer Engineers, TAMs – you name it – working with large enterprises in most/all major cities... Thomas Kurian's Google Cloud absolutely has sales and contracts in their DNA.

acdha 3y ago

AppEngine also hit the classic Google problem of missing attention to detail. I used it for a couple of projects in 2008/2009 and it just wasn’t competitive - cold starts were painful, you’d hit all of these gaps in features or random bugs in the tooling, etc. and while Datastore might scale it was consistently much slower than any mainstream SQL database so you really had to need that scaling. That was the first project which trained me not to use Google products. I remember reporting by a ton of stuff and then never hearing back and things never improving until much (multiple years?) later when I’d stopped using it. I was profoundly unsurprised when AWS ate their lunch.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> AppEngine also hit the classic Google problem of missing attention to detail. Amen, amen, amen. This is so frustrating to me because in general I really like GCP as a platform, and I think they're doing great things with stuff like Cloud Run. Case in point, I like Firebase a lot, and I think Firebase Auth (aka Google Identity Platform) is a great product. But it took them about 2.5 years between releasing their initial support for a second factor, which was originally SMS only, and allowing a TOTP (e.g. Google Authenticator/Auth) 2nd factor. And they still don't support "remember this device" functionality, so every time someone logs in they always need to enter the 2nd factor. I literally can't think of any major site (especially Google's own) that doesn't support "remember this device", and yet it just must be a detail that's not "important enough" to get someone at Google a promotion.
- acdha 3y ago
  Yeah, the updates I’m still getting on parity-with-AWS tickets from before the pandemic just reminds me that nobody at Google gets promoted for removing warts. They did close my textbook example of that but it took half a decade to implement HTTP to HTTPS redirects, which basically every large customer wants to make compliance easier: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904733 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904733
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Wow, that issue thread basically shows everything that's wrong with Google when it comes to dealing with business customers, though I do give them credit that it seems to have slightly improved near the end there: at least a Google PM was giving status updates and engaging with the commenters - before that for years it was just crickets. Here is my similar (though not as long) example - point-in-time-recovery on postgres: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/78448400 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/78448400. Interestingly, it had the same problem with 0 communication from a Google PM until early 2020, so maybe they hired someone at that time who convinced them you can't treat business customers the same way you do consumers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jmugan 3y ago
I had the same experience with AppEngine. I kept hitting snags and just couldn't get them solved so I gave up on it and moved to AWS.
- carom 3y ago
  Exact opposite experience here. I love AppEngine and can't get Beanstalk to work for the life of me.

marcinzm 3y ago

In theory good kubernetes integration makes GCP have a competitive advantage.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

paulddraper 3y ago

K8 definitely helped Google Cloud. Sure it wasn't enough alone to outlet outplay AWS, but Google would have been worse off without it

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Really? To turn the question on its head a bit, Amazon has EKS, and they don't seem to be any worse off for having not invented it.
- harpratap 3y ago
  GKE in general seems to be doing better than EKS though. They have a lot of things right and EKS seems to be playing catch-up. For example if you look at any Multi-cluster Kubernetes setup by AWS it's just a giant duct-tape rather than a ground-up solution. GKE worked on fundamentals first like multi-cluster endpoints, multi-cluster services, multi-cluster ingress, multi-cluster config-sync and now bringing it all together under GKE Enterprise.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Thanks, this is helpful context, most appreciated.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    I did a migration to GKE at a previous company and it was basically great to work with. At the time we had a few teething issues with the most edge-casey bits of our system, to do with getting ingress and CDNs to work well together I think. The end result was a little more manual Terraforming than would have been ideal, but it all worked, and I believe the improvement needed from GCP was on their roadmap and came a few months later. GKE (with Autopilot) is firmly set in my "day 1 toolbox" if I were to start a new company, assuming K8S was the right tech choice.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  EKS came years later.

kccqzy 3y ago

I believe the issue goes much deeper. Google itself did not have a scalable SQL DB when App Engine first came out. Spanner was still being designed. Even if Google understood that customers wanted a SQL DB, it could not give them that.

vineyardmike 3y ago
But lost people don’t need a scalable database. They need Postgres for 200 rows. Or really just SQLite but over the network.
barrkel 3y ago
Google was running MySQL in different flavours and configurations before Spanner. I suspect strategy tax (knowing Spanner was coming along eventually) might have been a reason for not offering that as a managed option though.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Which actually goes to the heart of the issue. Who cares what Google had? MySQL and Postgres existed - Amazon RDS first came out in 2009, and you could run DBs on EC2 before that. Google famously uses lots of custom versions of infrastructure software while the rest of the world uses something else. Obviously that has served then extremely well, but the rest of the world wants stuff they are familiar with. It really took Google years to fully grasp that.

Animats 3y ago

MapReduce helped solve a huge internal problem for Google - how to update the index dynamically. Originally, index updates were batch jobs that took days to run. But MapReduce isn't the solution to that problem. It's just the orchestration for the algorithm. It was figuring out how to partition that matrix inversion that was the hard part. Most of Google's problems in B2B reflect that the organization has little concept of customer service, in the sense of serving customers. It's not the technology. The current problem with AI for Google is that the good stuff costs a bit too much to give away with search. That problem may be solved, or evaded. Most searches or questions don't need a large language model. I expect to see systems where you ask a question, and if it's hard, you get something like "That's a hard question. Give me a minute to work on that. Meanwhile, here's a word from our sponsor."

spinningslate 3y ago
> Most of Google's problems in B2B reflect that the organization has little concept of customer service, in the sense of serving customers. It's not the technology. This, exactly. Google is fantastic at research, great at development. It's terrible at product. Or, specifically, all the bits of product that aren't R&D. MapReduce, Tensorflow and Kubernetes are all examples of technical successes that Google has spawned. None is a product. You can't buy them, buy support, or, you know, actually talk to someone if something goes wrong. That's why Google cloud has failed so far. It's not the tech; big G can go toe to toe with Amazon and MS on that. It's that enterprises want contracts and support and relationship managers and all that stuff. That just doesn't seem to be in Google's DNA. Unless they can adress that, they're not going to win with big org customers. They might win the startups - where the customers are themselves techies who are OK with self supporting, looking up Stackoverflow, asking ChatGPT, etc. But unless they can address the people angle, I don't see Vertex gaining meaningful traction against Amazon or OpenAI/MS.
- ctippett 3y ago
  Make no mistake, Google has a legion of Account Managers, Customer Engineers, TAMs – you name it – working with large enterprises in most/all major cities... Thomas Kurian's Google Cloud absolutely has sales and contracts in their DNA.