This just feels like an internally contradictory hit piece...<p>It complains Google wasn't good at sales, but then lists "numerous companies" brought on. It complains that the offerings are "learner than AWS" but then admits Google has shown up "extremely competitively". A competitor (of course) claims "Google is just not a factor" but close to the end the choice becomes a "close call".<p>So which is it? Considering how late Google got into the cloud game, it seems to be doing respectably well, given all of the catch-up it's needed to do first.
Interesting, I'm in the US and I think of GCP as the best of the three factoring cost and reliability of their features.<p>For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings.<p>For Google you may not want to get locked in, but the offerings seem to offer some really good benefits and work correctly.<p>Maybe this is just "grass is greener" thinking, but what is the experience using GCP like?
So, as far as I always understood, there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space. UPS and FedEx, Coca Cola and Pepsi, Oracle and MSSQL, etc.<p>From my professional perspective (integration specialist of a database vendor), all enterprises are either going to AWS or Azure. I think this is almost inevitable: the differences between the clouds are simply not big enough to make a difference from an executive's perspective, so to manage risk, you either go with what you know (Azure) or the market leader (AWS).<p>Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete.<p>I just don't see this happening under their new cloud leadership (former Oracle, sales-oriented exec). It would have to be driven by massive innovation, not by "doing the same stuff as AWS but then slightly better/cheaper".<p>What are HN's thought about this?<p>(Obligatory disclaimer: on a personal level I absolutely love Google Cloud and think it's a much more developer-friendly environment, but professionally I just can't make a strong case for why, say, a financial institution should use Google Cloud rather than AWS or Azure.)<p>EDIT: Did not expect this topic to be downvoted this far. Is this not an appropriate discussion / violate any rules?<p>[1] "Law of Duality" <a href="https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/dp/0887306667" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/d...</a>
In the US Google is often referred to as part of the "big 3", but my understanding is GCP is globally in 4th place behind AWS, Azure and Alibaba cloud.<p>Alibaba is extremely dominant in South-East Asia and if you're doing any work in Indonesia, and Malaysia in particular which have "data sovereignty" regulations, they are the only game in town. AWS and Azure have some inroads (both have AZs in Japan, Korea, Singapore, HK and mainland China) but GCP is nowhere distinctively interesting (unless you want to do something in Taiwan I guess?).<p>So at least if you're trying to roll out in Asia there's really little reason to even consider GCP. You'd go Alibaba if you want the dominant regional player and AWS or Azure if that's what you use everywhere else.
Diane Greene is and never was a good executive to lead an enterprise business. She is more of a technologist/scientist and better at small/medium sized businesses.<p>She built VMware which was a great technology but stupidly sold to EMC for $60M, leaving a lot of money on the table. EMC rightly fired her because she couldn’t scale and replaced her with Paul Maritz who was more suitable for this job.<p>The idea that she could handle a large and diverse org like GCP was a gamble at best, and it looks like it lost, again.
I personally didn't understand their niche until I went to work for a county school district and saw how embedded they were. Surprisingly there are a lot of business opportunities to sell to school districts if you are GCP friendly. Unfortunately the sales model is very phobic to monthly subscriptions, which doesn't fit the cloud very well.
> <i>...while AWS and Microsoft are geared toward serving customers and responding quickly to their requests, Google touts its own technology, selling what it thinks clients need.</i><p>This sums it up, and is the core problem with GCP.<p>Unfortunately the replacement CEO is the person who ran Oracle Cloud, which is far worse currently than GCP. The future does not look bright.
The primary issue is Google’s complete lack of knowledge and apathy regarding Enterprise sales. I’m sure they have plenty of employees with experience and understanding of the Enterprise business but their entire culture and management layer is way too heavily weighted toward engineering to successfully sell to the Enterprise. Slootman was probably right in that Google needs a major aquisition to bring in a global sales culture rather than trying to build it from scratch. And then the old guard needs to not crush that culture. Activist employees won’t make it any easier to grow their Enterprise business as every company in the world has things you can protest about.<p>Perhaps Google should focus on undercutting Amazon and Micosoft at the low end while building up their cloud capabilities and Enterprise sales culture. And then really go after the large customers 2 years from now.
To be succeeded by Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle... (for 12 years!)<p>Now I know nothing about the man, and Google definitely needs to learn how to deal with enterprise customers.<p>But this doesn't exactly fill me with hope.
People here are complaining about the enterprise, but I'm not really part of that segment (the complete IT dept of my company is about 10 employees) and I also feel ignored by Google in my small microcosm.<p>With the change of leadership I guess small dev teams like mine will become even more ignored as it seems GCP's will focus on the big whales instead of small fish with different needs.<p>Anyway, from my perspective, it really feels like GCP is living 5 years ago and has zero ambition or understanding of what's going on in the dev space. Also I have to say its marketing is generally doing a poor job at convincing people to use their services.<p>Some concrete examples to expand on the previous points:<p>I want a simple and convenient Heroku-like service (and hopefully a better price). For years I had no idea App Engine even existed and after checking it out a couple of times I still have no idea how it compares in terms of pricing.<p>I want GraphQL services like AWS AppSync, Prisma, or Hasura. Google has zero GraphQL services (AFAIK).<p>I want serverless solutions like AWS Lambda or like Zeit Now v2. AWS recently even announced Aurora serverless (a relational database unlike the usual NoSQL). The serverless offerings by Google are quite frankly mediocre. Our team is moving away from Firebase and Google's cloud functions offerings are really lagging behind Lambda.
They literally should stop pilling up crap like kubernetes and look back at what 9P and Plan9 were and why. Especially that they have almost the whole Plan9 team employed.<p>Making analogues of J2EE Application Servers for native code is the wrong way. It is against intelligence.