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Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

136 points by thelastgallon 1y ago

RedShift1 1y ago
We use GCP at work, it works well for what we use it (VMs, container storage, cloud file storage), I wish they would stop deprecating stuff though, it just causes developer busy work with no additional value.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > it just causes developer busy work with no additional value. Anyone remotely familiar with Google as a third party developer will notice the pattern: this will ramp up until it is almost your entire job simply dealing with their changes, most of which will be not-quite-actual-fixes to their previous round of changes. This is not unique to Google, but it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other companies, and so help preserve the moat.
  - refulgentis 1y ago
    > it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other companies, and so help preserve the moat. Worked at Google for 7 years, and your post reminds me it is time to share a secret: it is Koyaanisqatsi* and people's base instincts unbridled, no more. There is no quicker route to irrelevancy than being the person who cares about something from last years OKRs. * to be clear, s/Koyaanisqatsi/too big to exist healthily and yet it does exist -- edited this in, after I realized it's unclear even if you watched the movie and know the translation of the word
    - embedding-shape 1y ago
      If it's so obvious, and Google supposedly know this internally, and can obviously tell by others that some are avoiding Google because they're fast at sunsetting services, why are they not doing anything about it?
      - refulgentis 1y ago
        Imaginary conversation between an honest VP and earnest year 0 me, here's what the VP says: "We definitely care about deprecations: now tell me how to accomplish that with Sundar's Focus™* Agenda over the last 2 years" * no net headcount increases, random firings, and any new headcount should be overseas. i.e. we have the same # of people we did in 2021 with 50% more to do.
      - Insanity 1y ago
        Because it’s not meaningfully hurting their bottom line.
    - jp_nc 1y ago
      If they actually incentivized a group to support stability and continuity among enterprise customers, they would probably be able to diversify their revenue away from ads. Microsoft understands this…
      - refulgentis 1y ago
        The real sick thing is it doesn't matter, right? Like we're commenting on an article about how they won the day yesterday and Cloud revenue continues to skyrocket. To be clear, I agree with you, and am puzzled by the lack of consequences from the real world for the stuff I saw. But that was always the mystery of Google to me, in a nutshell: How can we keep getting away with this?
        fidotron 1y ago
        > How can we keep getting away with this? A large part of that is the Google-are-super-geniuses PR effort. Anyone pointing out that Google's products don't reflect this to their boss faces having their own credibility reduced instead.
  - a4isms 1y ago
    Old-timers who date back to when Joel Spolsky's early musings on the business of software development were fixtures on the HN front page will remember him using the phrase "fire and motion" for Microsoft's old strategy of constantly making changes so that everyone trying to keep up was—like the Red Queen—running as fast as they could but not getting anywhere. > Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward? > Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. —Joel Spolsky, "Fire and Motion," 2002 https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
    - CheeseFromLidl 1y ago
      There’s a solution to the Fermi paradox somewhere in this string of comments.
    - adzm 1y ago
      > ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET Notably all of these still work, even if not getting new updates.
  - keeda 1y ago
    I used to think that made sense (as sibling mentions, Spolsky's "fire and motion" thesis)... until I worked at large-ish tech company whose internal platforms also kept doing this. Heck, the platform I owned also underwent a couple cycles of this. And so a large part of our work was just doing the Red Queen's race of deprecations and migrations. So it was definitely not "fire and motion," as there was no competition. I think platforms genuinely need to evolve as new use-cases onboard and technology progresses, and so the assumptions underpinning the platform's design and architecture no longer hold. However, I do think a small part of the problem was also PDD: "Promotion Driven Development."
- morkalork 1y ago
  It's not just busy work, it's like being chained to a sandpaper treadmill especially in some specific "hot" domains like AI. It feels like you can build something with it and 3 months later you've got to update your code because half the dependencies are deprecated.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    In AI, whatever you wrote is going to be deprecated in theee months, and in six months SOTA LLMs will one-shot it directly. That's what it means for a domain to be "hot". AI is currently the largest and most intense global R&D project in the history of humanity. So for this one field, your complaint makes no sense.
- blitzar 1y ago
  It helps companies develop a vendor agnostic culture, its a great thing.
- cube00 1y ago
  > it works well for what we use it How do you handle the slow console?
  - written-beyond 1y ago
    Oh my god I thought I was the only one. Everyone says that you should be using the command line anyway, but I'd rather use a GUI but it's disgustingly slow.
    - r_lee 1y ago
      The CLI also takes like 5 seconds to do anything
      - CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
        It surprises me that it's built in Python (as is AWS'), which doesn't seem like a very appropriate language for exactly this reason. Go would seem much more apposite.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        jonfw 1y ago
        These CLIs are just thin request clients a la curl. The code execution time is peanuts in comparison to the request latency
        CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
        It's not negligible versus a single request. Even `gcloud --help` takes over a second on this machine - actually getting it to do a simple list request takes almost no time longer over any reasonable connection. Plus Python is notoriously not easy to deploy for - a Go (or Rust or whatever) binary would have almost no dependencies to worry about.
        1y ago
- Pxtl 1y ago
  Obligatory Steve Yegge rant about the Google deprecation treadmill: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... > Dear RECIPIENT, > Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem. > We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year. > Please go fuck yourself, > Google Cloud Platform
  - aiahs 1y ago
    Great read, thanks for sharing
- mg 1y ago
  One approach to prevent being hit by "stack rot" is to build everything on top of plain Linux VMs. Those rarely change.
  - Otek 1y ago
    But then you have to maintain it yourself, which overall usually wilk be more work than just migrating from time to time
  - whynotminot 1y ago
    Your cost just shifts elsewhere, then. Rolling your own stack from Linux up is a big endeavor too.
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    Unfortunately the software deployed on top of them will. So you either: 1) postpone all your updates for years until a bad CVE hits and you need to update or some application goes end of life and you’re screwed because updating becomes a massive exercise 2) do regular updates and patches to the entire stack, including Linux, in which case, you’re in the same position you were before with running on the stack rot treadmill So you might’ve moved the rot to a different place, but I don’t know if you’ve reduced any of it. I’ve owned stuff deployed off of vanilla VMs and I actually found it harder to maintain because everything was a one-off.
    - jillesvangurp 1y ago
      My rationale for staying up to date aggressively is that it minimizes integration work. Basically integration work multiplies, it doesn't just accumulate. So the further you fall behind the more that can break when you finally do upgrade. And you create needlessly more work related to testing and fixing all that. Upgrading a system that was fully up to date until a few days/weeks ago is generally easy. There's only so much that changes. Doing the same to something that was last touched five years ago can be a bit painful. Apis that no longer exist. Components that are no longer supported. Code that no longer compiles. Etc. I see a lot of teams being overly conservative with keeping their stuff up to date running with years out of date stuff with lots of known & fixed bugs of all varieties, performance issues that have long since been addressed, etc. All in the name of stability. I treat anything that isn't up to date as technical debt. If an update breaks stuff, I need to know so I can either deal with it or document a work around or a (usually temporary) version rollback. While that happens, it doesn't happen a lot. And I prefer knowing about these things because I've tried it over being ignorant of the breakage because I haven't updated anything in years. It just adds to the hidden pile of technical debt you don't even know you have. Ignorance is not an excuse for not dealing with your technical debt. Or worse compounding it by building on top of it and creating more technical debt in the process. Dealing with small changes over time is a lot less work than with dealing with a large delta all at once. It's something I've been doing for years. If I work on any of my projects, the first thing I do is update dependencies. Make sure stuff still works (tests). Make sure deprecated APIs are dealt with.
andrewstuart 1y ago
Such a blerg nothing company with almost no innovation sitting on a cash volcano that never stops erupting. I often think about what an incredible bargain YouTube was at $1 billion.
- PunchTornado 1y ago
  almost no innovation? from transformers to alphago to the quantum stuff.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    A bit like Xerox, Bell, Kodak or IBM back in the day then?
- csomar 1y ago
  They have completely monopolized access. I was thinking am a weird exception for not ranking for the exact name/domain of my product until I have met a couple other entrepreneurs who have names/domains and still don't rank first but instead some other random website will show up. So just the simple fact of "existing" on the Internet now costs money. Not only that, with their ads, you can target competitors search names. So you need to outbid your competitors so that your users don't get directed to your competitors by "accident". When I lost uBlock last month, I was surprised how many sites buy ads for their own names.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    > So just the simple fact of "existing" on the Internet now costs money. Not only that, with their ads, you can target competitors search names. So you need to outbid your competitors so that your users don't get directed to your competitors by "accident". To be clear, they have been doing this for so long I was first told it by a friend in the travel sector almost 20 years ago, along with the explanation of why this ends up absorbing a frightening proportion of the spare money in the economy. The whole reason Google had such a nightmare over Facebook was FB is the only thing that broke their monopoly on this, which is why FB also prints money.
JCM9 1y ago
Impressive results. Microsoft also reported strong cloud growth yesterday. Amazon reports today. AWS has been slipping and at current growth rates would slip to the number 2 cloud provider in a few years time… let’s see if that trend holds true today.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  > Microsoft also reported strong cloud growth yesterday. Is that why Azure was down, maybe it was out celebrating? Hahah
- lvl155 1y ago
  Amazon and Apple are two companies taking it conservatively in this bubble. Possibly because they actually have gone through the last bubble with some pain. Microsoft to some degree but they have the luxury of OpenAI. We are at a point in this bubble where planned capex is approaching theorectical limits of actual energy capacity. Let’s see when they start pumping coal companies because they restart those plants…not even joking.
  - smt88 1y ago
    Apple is "taking it easy" because of embarrassing ineptitude, not because it's their strategy
    - piva00 1y ago
      It can be both, they're taking it easy meaning they aren't on a hiring spree of "top talent" (like Meta paying 8-9 figures for such) which in turn becomes ineptitude since they aren't betting on it. Even the labour market for the required skills is absurdly overvalued, if they don't see it as a major priority they won't spend the necessary rates for it.
      - smt88 1y ago
        They don't need the hiring spree if they don't train their own models. They rolled out search without building a search engine and could've done the same with AI.
tomaytotomato 1y ago
There was a blog post on here the other day about moving back to bare metal hosting with practical explanations and problem solving. Cloud is great but its just borrowing someone else's machine for a fee. It's like a hyper-scalable and granular mainframe but like all mainframes, the client is powerless without it. We need to get our acts together and not allow ourselves to be smothered in silicon nimbus (clouds) and lose track of the open sky that is the internet. I am not suggesting going back to the 2000s with a small tower PC under someone's desk with a blinking light running a business critical cron job. Just that we need more appetite to take responsibility of our servers and systems. Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....?
- chii 1y ago
  > Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....? I rather not, but instead these compute clouds should be treated similarly to utilities - you don't really want to be running your own generators for electricity do you? So why is it that we can setup utilities properly, where everybody can trust that it stays on and usable for a price low enough? My theory is that vendor lock in is the cause. Cloud should be a commodity, but it isn't because nobody in the cloud business wants to be a commodity. Hence, they have every incentive to prevent it from happening.
  - formercoder 1y ago
    Because utilities are commodities and natural monopolies. CSPs are neither.
  - paganel 1y ago
    Utilities prices are also pretty damn high right now, not sure if that’s the best way to choose going forward.
  - tehwebguy 1y ago
    Sort of an aside but utilities are done differently in many states and the expansion they are doing specifically to accommodate data centers is going to massively increase consumer rates
shubhamjain 1y ago
This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day. When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google. They already operate the world’s largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively. They can sustain large investment far longer than any other company simply because of how profitable all their existing businesses are. I just wish they would get their act together when it comes to product management.
- hypeatei 1y ago
  I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones. NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves via multi-billion dollar "investments"
  - wslh 1y ago
    NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet because Google has their own chips R&D. It's not just another data center buying NVIDIA's GPUs. BTW Apple is following suit regarding chips, don't know if at some point Apple will offer any cloud service or continue to work on their ecosystem only. Beyond that there are a lot of new chip companies attacking the market: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790
    - sjs382 1y ago
      While Google has their own chips, they don't really have the market power there to buy up bleeding-edge manufacturing capacity. Apple on the other hand... (though they're behind in other regards)
e12e 1y ago
> Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year. So, "search revenue" means ads, right? So with youtube ads, 66B out of 100B revenue is from advertising? In other words Alphabet is still an advertising company first, and foremost?
- websiteapi 1y ago
  the percentage of revenue due to ads is definitely lower than say last decade. by 2050 I expect the super majority of revenue to be non-ads.
  - e12e 1y ago
    Perhaps. I kind of expect that targeted LLM generated content will take over for ads, product placements etc.
tock 1y ago
What % of that revenue comes from this(FortNine video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA TLDR: Google shows the user an ad for a product they were already planning to buy at the very last minute.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
christkv 1y ago
One question is google it's own customer for GCP?
- pmsh 1y ago
  Basically no.
  - cloudking 1y ago
    Well kind of. They use the same data center infrastructure, with internal versions of the external GCP services.
    - kikkia 1y ago
      Depends on the service but for the most part googles infra has its own stack that GCP is built on top of. There is always initiatives going on to get more internal stuff running on GCP as opposed to the internal infra directly, but none of them have really stuck that I saw.
- blamestross 1y ago
  Not for the purposes of these numbers. They totally use GCP (and even "bill" themselves) but it is all isolated to one "Organization" that often gets special handling.
jammo 1y ago
Imagine what they could do if they focused a little bit more on making TPUs easier to use in real world applications. They are fantastic value but you feel like you're doing so much busy work to use them.
skywhopper 1y ago
“Over 70% of existing Google Cloud customers use its AI products, Pichai said.” That’s not by choice, of course. It’s difficult-to-impossible to turn off.
- film42 1y ago
  AKA... 70% of existing google cloud users have filled out a support ticket, which starts with a chat bot.
brazukadev 1y ago
That is a good % of all money going to tech. There is where all the money that pay for wages is going.
raw_anon_1111 1y ago
Google will win AI as far as the most profitable for the same reason that Apple keeps winning the cell phone market - again profits not market share - vertical integration. Google has the best infrastructure, its own chips TPUs and a huge customer base. Ben Thompson (Stratechery) and Horace Deidi (Asymco) have referenced Clay’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” about the difference between a disruptive technology and a sustaining technology. AI is going to help BigTech that exists today get bigger. The cloud providers - AWS, Google and Microsoft - are just exposing models as just another API to their existing customers. Google added AI overviews and an AI tab. Even Apple is going to come out ahead because developers who want local (free) inference can depend on iPhones to have decent hardware and local models. Facebook is using AI for better ad targeting. Where does that leave OpenAI? It’s been said plenty of times that no one is going to care about their models that are a commodity and they could put any decent model behind ChatGPT and it would be just as popular.
cess11 1y ago
It would be dandy if they were to specify how much they profit from genocide specifically.
bmitc 1y ago
> engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively Is that true? Google just has an infinite money printing machine and a city's worth of engineers. They don't strike me as a company that fits the description you wrote. I admit I'm biased at present since they killed off support for the Nests in my house.
hitekker 1y ago
How has Thomas Kurian performed as CEO? Seems like he hasn’t done too bad of a job.
- thethimble 1y ago
  GCP is growing 34% with a current annual run-rate of $60B in revenue. So I'd also say not too bad.
tsoukase 1y ago
By some napkin calc, Google has some billions of customers globally and about low hundred billions annual net income, so makes about 15-20$ per user. With Google I enjoy free full web service coverage (search, mail and the other popular products), a huge video site, a phone ecosystem and now AI, which otherwise would cost me hundreds of dollars in subscriptions. Let advertisers and paying developers subsidise this free web service world offer (and by ad blocking you avoid "being the product").

136 points by thelastgallon 1y ago

We use GCP at work, it works well for what we use it (VMs, container storage, cloud file storage), I wish they would stop deprecating stuff though, it just causes developer busy work with no additional value.

fidotron 1y ago
> it just causes developer busy work with no additional value. Anyone remotely familiar with Google as a third party developer will notice the pattern: this will ramp up until it is almost your entire job simply dealing with their changes, most of which will be not-quite-actual-fixes to their previous round of changes. This is not unique to Google, but it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other companies, and so help preserve the moat.
- refulgentis 1y ago
  > it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other companies, and so help preserve the moat. Worked at Google for 7 years, and your post reminds me it is time to share a secret: it is Koyaanisqatsi* and people's base instincts unbridled, no more. There is no quicker route to irrelevancy than being the person who cares about something from last years OKRs. * to be clear, s/Koyaanisqatsi/too big to exist healthily and yet it does exist -- edited this in, after I realized it's unclear even if you watched the movie and know the translation of the word
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    If it's so obvious, and Google supposedly know this internally, and can obviously tell by others that some are avoiding Google because they're fast at sunsetting services, why are they not doing anything about it?
    - refulgentis 1y ago
      Imaginary conversation between an honest VP and earnest year 0 me, here's what the VP says: "We definitely care about deprecations: now tell me how to accomplish that with Sundar's Focus™* Agenda over the last 2 years" * no net headcount increases, random firings, and any new headcount should be overseas. i.e. we have the same # of people we did in 2021 with 50% more to do.
    - Insanity 1y ago
      Because it’s not meaningfully hurting their bottom line.
  - jp_nc 1y ago
    If they actually incentivized a group to support stability and continuity among enterprise customers, they would probably be able to diversify their revenue away from ads. Microsoft understands this…
    - refulgentis 1y ago
      The real sick thing is it doesn't matter, right? Like we're commenting on an article about how they won the day yesterday and Cloud revenue continues to skyrocket. To be clear, I agree with you, and am puzzled by the lack of consequences from the real world for the stuff I saw. But that was always the mystery of Google to me, in a nutshell: How can we keep getting away with this?
      - fidotron 1y ago
        > How can we keep getting away with this? A large part of that is the Google-are-super-geniuses PR effort. Anyone pointing out that Google's products don't reflect this to their boss faces having their own credibility reduced instead.
- a4isms 1y ago
  Old-timers who date back to when Joel Spolsky's early musings on the business of software development were fixtures on the HN front page will remember him using the phrase "fire and motion" for Microsoft's old strategy of constantly making changes so that everyone trying to keep up was—like the Red Queen—running as fast as they could but not getting anywhere. > Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward? > Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. —Joel Spolsky, "Fire and Motion," 2002 https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
  - CheeseFromLidl 1y ago
    There’s a solution to the Fermi paradox somewhere in this string of comments.
  - adzm 1y ago
    > ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET Notably all of these still work, even if not getting new updates.
- keeda 1y ago
  I used to think that made sense (as sibling mentions, Spolsky's "fire and motion" thesis)... until I worked at large-ish tech company whose internal platforms also kept doing this. Heck, the platform I owned also underwent a couple cycles of this. And so a large part of our work was just doing the Red Queen's race of deprecations and migrations. So it was definitely not "fire and motion," as there was no competition. I think platforms genuinely need to evolve as new use-cases onboard and technology progresses, and so the assumptions underpinning the platform's design and architecture no longer hold. However, I do think a small part of the problem was also PDD: "Promotion Driven Development."
morkalork 1y ago
It's not just busy work, it's like being chained to a sandpaper treadmill especially in some specific "hot" domains like AI. It feels like you can build something with it and 3 months later you've got to update your code because half the dependencies are deprecated.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  In AI, whatever you wrote is going to be deprecated in theee months, and in six months SOTA LLMs will one-shot it directly. That's what it means for a domain to be "hot". AI is currently the largest and most intense global R&D project in the history of humanity. So for this one field, your complaint makes no sense.
blitzar 1y ago
It helps companies develop a vendor agnostic culture, its a great thing.
cube00 1y ago
> it works well for what we use it How do you handle the slow console?
- written-beyond 1y ago
  Oh my god I thought I was the only one. Everyone says that you should be using the command line anyway, but I'd rather use a GUI but it's disgustingly slow.
  - r_lee 1y ago
    The CLI also takes like 5 seconds to do anything
    - CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
      It surprises me that it's built in Python (as is AWS'), which doesn't seem like a very appropriate language for exactly this reason. Go would seem much more apposite.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - jonfw 1y ago
        These CLIs are just thin request clients a la curl. The code execution time is peanuts in comparison to the request latency
        CamouflagedKiwi 1y ago
        It's not negligible versus a single request. Even `gcloud --help` takes over a second on this machine - actually getting it to do a simple list request takes almost no time longer over any reasonable connection. Plus Python is notoriously not easy to deploy for - a Go (or Rust or whatever) binary would have almost no dependencies to worry about.
      - 1y ago
Pxtl 1y ago
Obligatory Steve Yegge rant about the Google deprecation treadmill: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... > Dear RECIPIENT, > Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem. > We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year. > Please go fuck yourself, > Google Cloud Platform
- aiahs 1y ago
  Great read, thanks for sharing
mg 1y ago
One approach to prevent being hit by "stack rot" is to build everything on top of plain Linux VMs. Those rarely change.
- Otek 1y ago
  But then you have to maintain it yourself, which overall usually wilk be more work than just migrating from time to time
- whynotminot 1y ago
  Your cost just shifts elsewhere, then. Rolling your own stack from Linux up is a big endeavor too.
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  Unfortunately the software deployed on top of them will. So you either: 1) postpone all your updates for years until a bad CVE hits and you need to update or some application goes end of life and you’re screwed because updating becomes a massive exercise 2) do regular updates and patches to the entire stack, including Linux, in which case, you’re in the same position you were before with running on the stack rot treadmill So you might’ve moved the rot to a different place, but I don’t know if you’ve reduced any of it. I’ve owned stuff deployed off of vanilla VMs and I actually found it harder to maintain because everything was a one-off.
  - jillesvangurp 1y ago
    My rationale for staying up to date aggressively is that it minimizes integration work. Basically integration work multiplies, it doesn't just accumulate. So the further you fall behind the more that can break when you finally do upgrade. And you create needlessly more work related to testing and fixing all that. Upgrading a system that was fully up to date until a few days/weeks ago is generally easy. There's only so much that changes. Doing the same to something that was last touched five years ago can be a bit painful. Apis that no longer exist. Components that are no longer supported. Code that no longer compiles. Etc. I see a lot of teams being overly conservative with keeping their stuff up to date running with years out of date stuff with lots of known & fixed bugs of all varieties, performance issues that have long since been addressed, etc. All in the name of stability. I treat anything that isn't up to date as technical debt. If an update breaks stuff, I need to know so I can either deal with it or document a work around or a (usually temporary) version rollback. While that happens, it doesn't happen a lot. And I prefer knowing about these things because I've tried it over being ignorant of the breakage because I haven't updated anything in years. It just adds to the hidden pile of technical debt you don't even know you have. Ignorance is not an excuse for not dealing with your technical debt. Or worse compounding it by building on top of it and creating more technical debt in the process. Dealing with small changes over time is a lot less work than with dealing with a large delta all at once. It's something I've been doing for years. If I work on any of my projects, the first thing I do is update dependencies. Make sure stuff still works (tests). Make sure deprecated APIs are dealt with.

andrewstuart 1y ago

Such a blerg nothing company with almost no innovation sitting on a cash volcano that never stops erupting. I often think about what an incredible bargain YouTube was at $1 billion.

PunchTornado 1y ago
almost no innovation? from transformers to alphago to the quantum stuff.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  A bit like Xerox, Bell, Kodak or IBM back in the day then?
csomar 1y ago
They have completely monopolized access. I was thinking am a weird exception for not ranking for the exact name/domain of my product until I have met a couple other entrepreneurs who have names/domains and still don't rank first but instead some other random website will show up. So just the simple fact of "existing" on the Internet now costs money. Not only that, with their ads, you can target competitors search names. So you need to outbid your competitors so that your users don't get directed to your competitors by "accident". When I lost uBlock last month, I was surprised how many sites buy ads for their own names.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > So just the simple fact of "existing" on the Internet now costs money. Not only that, with their ads, you can target competitors search names. So you need to outbid your competitors so that your users don't get directed to your competitors by "accident". To be clear, they have been doing this for so long I was first told it by a friend in the travel sector almost 20 years ago, along with the explanation of why this ends up absorbing a frightening proportion of the spare money in the economy. The whole reason Google had such a nightmare over Facebook was FB is the only thing that broke their monopoly on this, which is why FB also prints money.

JCM9 1y ago

Impressive results. Microsoft also reported strong cloud growth yesterday. Amazon reports today. AWS has been slipping and at current growth rates would slip to the number 2 cloud provider in a few years time… let’s see if that trend holds true today.

loloquwowndueo 1y ago
> Microsoft also reported strong cloud growth yesterday. Is that why Azure was down, maybe it was out celebrating? Hahah
lvl155 1y ago
Amazon and Apple are two companies taking it conservatively in this bubble. Possibly because they actually have gone through the last bubble with some pain. Microsoft to some degree but they have the luxury of OpenAI. We are at a point in this bubble where planned capex is approaching theorectical limits of actual energy capacity. Let’s see when they start pumping coal companies because they restart those plants…not even joking.
- smt88 1y ago
  Apple is "taking it easy" because of embarrassing ineptitude, not because it's their strategy
  - piva00 1y ago
    It can be both, they're taking it easy meaning they aren't on a hiring spree of "top talent" (like Meta paying 8-9 figures for such) which in turn becomes ineptitude since they aren't betting on it. Even the labour market for the required skills is absurdly overvalued, if they don't see it as a major priority they won't spend the necessary rates for it.
    - smt88 1y ago
      They don't need the hiring spree if they don't train their own models. They rolled out search without building a search engine and could've done the same with AI.

tomaytotomato 1y ago

There was a blog post on here the other day about moving back to bare metal hosting with practical explanations and problem solving. Cloud is great but its just borrowing someone else's machine for a fee. It's like a hyper-scalable and granular mainframe but like all mainframes, the client is powerless without it. We need to get our acts together and not allow ourselves to be smothered in silicon nimbus (clouds) and lose track of the open sky that is the internet. I am not suggesting going back to the 2000s with a small tower PC under someone's desk with a blinking light running a business critical cron job. Just that we need more appetite to take responsibility of our servers and systems. Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....?

chii 1y ago
> Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....? I rather not, but instead these compute clouds should be treated similarly to utilities - you don't really want to be running your own generators for electricity do you? So why is it that we can setup utilities properly, where everybody can trust that it stays on and usable for a price low enough? My theory is that vendor lock in is the cause. Cloud should be a commodity, but it isn't because nobody in the cloud business wants to be a commodity. Hence, they have every incentive to prevent it from happening.
- formercoder 1y ago
  Because utilities are commodities and natural monopolies. CSPs are neither.
- paganel 1y ago
  Utilities prices are also pretty damn high right now, not sure if that’s the best way to choose going forward.
- tehwebguy 1y ago
  Sort of an aside but utilities are done differently in many states and the expansion they are doing specifically to accommodate data centers is going to massively increase consumer rates

shubhamjain 1y ago

This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day. When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google. They already operate the world’s largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively. They can sustain large investment far longer than any other company simply because of how profitable all their existing businesses are. I just wish they would get their act together when it comes to product management.

hypeatei 1y ago
I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones. NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves via multi-billion dollar "investments"
- wslh 1y ago
  NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet because Google has their own chips R&D. It's not just another data center buying NVIDIA's GPUs. BTW Apple is following suit regarding chips, don't know if at some point Apple will offer any cloud service or continue to work on their ecosystem only. Beyond that there are a lot of new chip companies attacking the market: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790
  - sjs382 1y ago
    While Google has their own chips, they don't really have the market power there to buy up bleeding-edge manufacturing capacity. Apple on the other hand... (though they're behind in other regards)

e12e 1y ago

> Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year. So, "search revenue" means ads, right? So with youtube ads, 66B out of 100B revenue is from advertising? In other words Alphabet is still an advertising company first, and foremost?

websiteapi 1y ago
the percentage of revenue due to ads is definitely lower than say last decade. by 2050 I expect the super majority of revenue to be non-ads.
- e12e 1y ago
  Perhaps. I kind of expect that targeted LLM generated content will take over for ads, product placements etc.

tock 1y ago

What % of that revenue comes from this(FortNine video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA TLDR: Google shows the user an ad for a product they were already planning to buy at the very last minute.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

christkv 1y ago

One question is google it's own customer for GCP?

pmsh 1y ago
Basically no.
- cloudking 1y ago
  Well kind of. They use the same data center infrastructure, with internal versions of the external GCP services.
  - kikkia 1y ago
    Depends on the service but for the most part googles infra has its own stack that GCP is built on top of. There is always initiatives going on to get more internal stuff running on GCP as opposed to the internal infra directly, but none of them have really stuck that I saw.
blamestross 1y ago
Not for the purposes of these numbers. They totally use GCP (and even "bill" themselves) but it is all isolated to one "Organization" that often gets special handling.

jammo 1y ago

Imagine what they could do if they focused a little bit more on making TPUs easier to use in real world applications. They are fantastic value but you feel like you're doing so much busy work to use them.

skywhopper 1y ago

“Over 70% of existing Google Cloud customers use its AI products, Pichai said.” That’s not by choice, of course. It’s difficult-to-impossible to turn off.

film42 1y ago
AKA... 70% of existing google cloud users have filled out a support ticket, which starts with a chat bot.

brazukadev 1y ago

That is a good % of all money going to tech. There is where all the money that pay for wages is going.

raw_anon_1111 1y ago

Google will win AI as far as the most profitable for the same reason that Apple keeps winning the cell phone market - again profits not market share - vertical integration. Google has the best infrastructure, its own chips TPUs and a huge customer base. Ben Thompson (Stratechery) and Horace Deidi (Asymco) have referenced Clay’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” about the difference between a disruptive technology and a sustaining technology. AI is going to help BigTech that exists today get bigger. The cloud providers - AWS, Google and Microsoft - are just exposing models as just another API to their existing customers. Google added AI overviews and an AI tab. Even Apple is going to come out ahead because developers who want local (free) inference can depend on iPhones to have decent hardware and local models. Facebook is using AI for better ad targeting. Where does that leave OpenAI? It’s been said plenty of times that no one is going to care about their models that are a commodity and they could put any decent model behind ChatGPT and it would be just as popular.

cess11 1y ago

It would be dandy if they were to specify how much they profit from genocide specifically.

bmitc 1y ago

> engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively Is that true? Google just has an infinite money printing machine and a city's worth of engineers. They don't strike me as a company that fits the description you wrote. I admit I'm biased at present since they killed off support for the Nests in my house.

hitekker 1y ago

How has Thomas Kurian performed as CEO? Seems like he hasn’t done too bad of a job.

thethimble 1y ago
GCP is growing 34% with a current annual run-rate of $60B in revenue. So I'd also say not too bad.

tsoukase 1y ago

By some napkin calc, Google has some billions of customers globally and about low hundred billions annual net income, so makes about 15-20$ per user. With Google I enjoy free full web service coverage (search, mail and the other popular products), a huge video site, a phone ecosystem and now AI, which otherwise would cost me hundreds of dollars in subscriptions. Let advertisers and paying developers subsidise this free web service world offer (and by ad blocking you avoid "being the product").