Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this topic.<p>I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn&#x27;t reach #1 by 2023.<p>&gt; said people with knowledge of the matter.<p>As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw some meeting notes.<p>&gt; The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market.<p>So it&#x27;s not about being #1, it&#x27;s about being profitable.<p>In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an executive level ever.<p>You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. &quot;at risk of losing funding&quot; can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level.<p>And finally:<p>&gt; A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this story, but after it appeared released the following statement: &quot;Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate.&quot;<p>There may be some truth to these accounts--reality is often between the lines--but this is extremely soft on details and actual first person accounts.

I can&#x27;t imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that&#x27;s already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when they&#x27;ll abandon cloud. How could anyone in their right mind start building on GCP? They may as well shut it down today.

I want to put on end to the &quot;you can&#x27;t contact Google&quot; comments that comes up every time Google Cloud makes the front page.<p>You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I&#x27;m currently at a small startup using GCP, and I&#x27;ve been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS.<p>We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have a Slack channel we share with our dedicated GCP contacts, so we can easily ask questions. Two of my coworkers just got out of a meeting with Google PMs less than an hour ago. Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team(s).<p>Yes, you have to pay for support. They have a couple different support options, depending on your needs. But you have to pay for support with AWS too.<p>The one bad thing about Google Cloud support is their Level 1 support. It is very easy to submit a support ticket, and they will respond quickly. But if you are highly technical, and know what you are doing, and can research yourself, Level 1 support it nearly useless. They do make it easy to to escalate, with a prominent <i>Escalate</i> button in the ticket. And you can always escalate through your direct contacts (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineer). But it would be nice if Level 1 could be bypassed, or were more technical. I think they are trying to iterate on the process. They recently started offering to have a video call a lot of the time, which isn&#x27;t my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying to improve the Level 1 support.<p>If you are using Google Cloud as part of a business, you will be able to contact them. You will probably have an account manager that you can probably meet in person with. If you pay for support you will be able to submit support tickets, real humans will respond, and respond quickly.

Oh my god. How is Google so clueless to let this leak?<p>Now that we know they&#x27;re not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023, what reason does anyone in their right might have to use their services?<p>I was previously considering GCP. And now I&#x27;m not.<p>Great job, Google. You&#x27;re so short-sighted you&#x27;ll remain in adtech forever. Not even your founders could keep interest.<p>This leak was a billion dollar mistake. And I&#x27;m grateful for it. It&#x27;s saved me a whole lot of headache.

People with <i>real</i> knowledge to the matter knows that GCP is growing, and more companies are adopting GCP every month.<p>This is an attempt (which according to some of the comments here quite succeed) to create a story where there is no story.<p>Should Google Cloud aim to be better and bigger? Sure. Should Google &#x2F; Alphabet execs need to discuss challenges and strategy? Sure.<p>What and where is the story?<p>GCP produce new products and features every week [1]<p>At my company, we use all major 3 clouds. The GCP support is super fast. The GCP price is better than other two.<p>Google indeed has a learning curve as a company, and that is at the area of selling to the enterprise. By its DNA, Google is an engineering company, and it takes years to understand how to &quot;attack&quot; the market, build teams of sales, marketing, and all the supporting infrastructure, and they do it.<p>Time will tell how successful they are, but I cannot see any option for them to shut down this great platform known as GCP. It simply make no sense.<p>There is a trend in the media in the recent months to rant about Google by all means and angles, and I tend to think this article is just one of those.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;</a>

<i>The clock is ticking for Google Cloud.<p>The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.</i><p>That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy.<p>When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.<p>On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering.<p>Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.

They put the guy that ran ORACLE&#x27;S CLOUD STRATEGY in charge of GCP.<p>ORACLE&#x27;S. CLOUD. STRATEGY.<p>Let&#x27;s hire Thomas Kurian, bang up job on Fusion and ... oh wait, what do you mean with &#x27;total failure&#x27;?<p>Oracle bought Sun, it had the keys to be the third force against AWS and MSFT - and they totally blew it. Just an amazing fumble, worse than MSFT and smartphones.

AWS is unassailable as number one, but Azure is more fragile than they might appear in their #2 position. <i>They use their Office online revenue to boost their numbers (EDIT: apparently they don&#x27;t do that anymore)</i>, and their utilization is probably lower than the competition because they rely heavily on bundling new cloud services into legacy contracts at renewal to reach their targets. So lots of Office &#x2F; Outlook &#x2F; AD &#x2F; Windows Server customers are getting hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars worth of Azure that they’re not using, but count against their revenue number anyway.<p>On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of the three.<p>What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead.<p>I think if Google were to get serious about communicating focus and dedication to their cloud business (the opposite of what they’re doing now), they could conceivably catch up to Microsoft.

As a Google Cloud Platform customer, this is pretty concerning news and seems likely to drive me to start looking at alternatives <i>and also</i> likely to avoid placing any dependencies on Google-specific platform features.<p>So, if any Google Cloud employees are reading this, please report back that this just killed any interest I had in Anthos, Google Cloud Run, the managed Google &quot;Kubernetes Apps&quot;, etc. Pretty much anything that isn&#x27;t basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes.

I&#x27;m astounded that they would seriously consider closing GCP after committing so much time, money, and effort into building it.<p>Every time there&#x27;s a GCP story on HN commenters say &quot;I won&#x27;t use it because Google can just pull the plug.&quot; I thought this opinion was silly as GCP is the #3 cloud provider in the world, not a free service like Reader.<p>Guess I was wrong, nothing is safe. Google wants #1 or nothing at all.

I&#x27;m surprised that the overall sentiment of the comments indicates that gcloud&#x27;s offerings are inferior to aws &#x2F; azure. I&#x27;ve worked with all of the clouds and have found Google to have the best product. Their GKE with built in Istio support is a killer feature. Spanner is best in class. Competitors do not provide a useable alternative to Firestore realtime database. Pizza Hut is the most popular pizza in the USA, doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s the best.

I couldn&#x27;t help but laugh out loud when I saw this headline on Twitter. It&#x27;s just <i>kisses fingers</i>.<p>So now that everyone knows they are waffling on whether to stay in the business (and have a deadline), Microsoft and Amazon just need to increase the competitive intensity for the next few years to drive Google out and instead of cloud computing being an oligopoly it&#x27;ll be a duopoly.<p>If you&#x27;re a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible, because the long-term future of this market is AWS and Azure being an extremely high margin duopoly with massive barriers to entry. You might see aggressive competition before 2023, but 10 years out it&#x27;s not going to be that.<p>The NYT wrote a piece a few days ago about certain startups considering antitrust complaints against AWS, and more of them should consider that [1]. The FTC is investigating AWS [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;15&#x2F;technology&#x2F;amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;15&#x2F;technology&#x2F;amazon-aws-clo...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;amazon-aws-cloud-business-ftc-antitrust-scrutiny-report-2019-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;amazon-aws-cloud-business-ft...</a>

I worked with GCP on a small (&lt;6 weeks) project last year and the experience left me with a bad taste. Their reps were fairly condescending, questioned my requests regularly, over-engineered what was a fairly straight-forward ask (twice in a week updates, for a 6 week project) where the specs were clearly laid out at the beginning. I then realized that the people who noted the specs and the people who actually had to work on it had not spoken to each other at all so I had to explain the entire ask all over again.<p>Somewhere down the line, they came back to me to let me know that I had not given them clear instructions and what I had asked was impossible. In the meanwhile, an intern in my team had got the entire solution up-and-running on a small, self-hosted containerized service. I showed them and they mumble about something to be fixed and how they&#x27;ll get back to me. All in all, a complete waste of time, resources and bandwidth. I am glad it was for just six weeks and in hindsight, I&#x27;m happy I didn&#x27;t get the rest of my team involved in it.<p>We have worked with Azure since then and I am super impressed with their professionalism. There are hiccups but the understanding I now hold is this - Google (probably still) builds great consumer products but have zero clue on how to work with enterprises while it appears to be the opposite with Microsoft. Their razor-sharp and sole focus on enterprise appears to help them excel instead of having a diffused, unclear strategy that is Google&#x27;s currently.

Well this is one way to kill your cloud business. Even a hint that execs were considering or debating this move is enough to kill any serious company&#x27;s interest in GCP.<p>Why would you ever consider GCP over AWS&#x2F;Azure knowing that the Google scythe could kill it at any time, with your suspicions confirmed by a leak this? Bonkers.

The crazy part about this is that in the meeting of setting targets one option that came up was folding the cloud unit entirely. And this was already after billions invested.<p>I don&#x27;t really believe that they will leave the cloud wars, but still goes to show you the scale and profitability of their ad business and how central it is that even after billions of invested they can still decide to shutter something.<p>Doesn&#x27;t exactly instill confidence in your customers to trust you for the service you provide.

Reminds me of Ray Noorda[1]. Nothing good ever happens when companies focus entirely on their competitors. If Google really wants to beat Amazon &amp; Microsoft in &quot;Cloud&quot;, they should focus entirely on the customer and the value they can provide that customer.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ray_Noorda" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ray_Noorda</a>

If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I&#x27;m afraid something will go wrong and I won&#x27;t be able to talk to a human. I&#x27;ve heard so many stories about the &quot;stone wall&quot; that is Google customer support. Also, I&#x27;m afraid the rug will get pulled out from under me if I decide to go all in given their history of axing projects that they don&#x27;t want to support anymore.

Every company should question the businesses they&#x27;re in periodically. But having that discussion leak to the public is disastrous. Trust in executive decisions at Google must be extremely low if all their internal business keeps becoming public knowledge.

As with previous articles, The Information has unlocked this one for HN readers. Thanks!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=by%3Adang%20%22the%20information%22%20unlock&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a>

Ha! A year ago I steered away from GCP for a long-term personal project because I had a small but persistent worry that they&#x27;d shut it down, and switching clouds has a cost. I considered myself near-crazy for making the decision on that basis -- they wouldn&#x27;t do that, would they?! that&#x27;s silly! that&#x27;s ridiculous! -- and was a little embarrassed to reveal my rationale to others. Saying it out loud sounded so alarmist, so far-fetched.<p>And yet here we are. Glad I kept clutching those pearls.<p>#2 by 2023? Good luck. I wouldn&#x27;t bet a dollar on them knocking Amazon or Microsoft off their perches by then, and I won&#x27;t spend another dollar on GCP.

This a self fulfilling prophecy. They set a deadline to be a top player, but now that the strategy has leaked, lots of customers will abandon or not take up the service since they who wants to invest in a cloud service that could be abandoned in a few years? The writing is on the wall now.

Wow, this is a real indictment of goog’s plan to take the loot from ads and spend to diversify. They basically invented the cloud model, and if they don’t have the culture and the ability to expand to this most naturally of expansion areas.. they are doomed.<p>There is something seriously broken at google. This puts Larry quitting in more context. He’s lost confidence in google doing this, then there is nothing left for the org to do. Over—compensated, over-entitled, over-talented engineers that, when put together can’t actually accomplish anything.<p>Maybe gutting the product org all those years ago was a mistake.

You have to wonder whether &quot;must be number 1 or 2&quot; came out of some pop-management text.<p>What exactly is wrong with being on the list of potential cloud providers for almost every project? Have you ever been on a non-MS project where someone didn&#x27;t at least mention GCP instead of AWS?<p>Google being as profitable as it is can afford options. Why not sit around in number 3 spot?

These executives have no one to blame for erosion of trust in Google but themselves. Here is a company that appears to be driven by transient market share in their decisions while appointing itself the caretaker of the open internet and the dictator of open standards.

Nothing makes me want to subscribe to a company&#x27;s offerings more than timelines, or threats it might be eliminated. That is one of the many reasons why GCP has not taken off; outside of Amazon and Microsoft just having much better salesmen&#x2F;women.<p><i>The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.</i>

This is insane, GCP has been a great experience for me and I have even been working on getting their certs now because I like working with it that much despite them currently being worthless.<p>Its crazy that they would even consider closing google cloud after gaining so much traction. Especially with BigQuery, Dataflow, Firebase, Kubernetes engine and Cloud Run being at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going. Dialogflow is also hitting at the right time where smart home products and home automation are becoming mainstream.<p>How do they expect to do in 7 years (launch of compute engine) what Amazon did in 13? Its crazy that they would be so unreasonable.

The analysis from the Gartner Magic Quadrant circa July 2019, states some of it&#x27;s concerns&#x2F;cautions with regards to cloud based offerings from Alibaba v Google, which not only highlights how far ahead the top two contenders really are in the race, but also set to continue their meteoric rise.<p>&quot;Alibaba Cloud earns 90% of its revenue in China and has not appreciably grown its enterprise customer base outside of China. Alibaba has limited capabilities in terms of an MSP ecosystem, third-party enterprise software integration and operational tools; and small global field teams limit adoption outside of China.&quot;<p>&quot;Google demonstrates an immaturity of process and procedures when dealing with enterprise accounts, which can make the company difficult to transact with at times. This can be attributed to its nascent focus on the enterprise market. The immaturity of process is most pronounced in areas such as contract negotiation, discounting, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing, integration with enterprise systems and support.&quot;

Google Cloud could have easily dominated the market if they were willing to share their internal technology instead of knock-offs they offered. Now it&#x27;s too late, competition improved their mediocre offerings and outside TPUs there is no advantage anymore.

Makes me very reluctant to build something in Google&#x27;s cloud. Can they not see value in being third as long as it is profitable?

I think the main reason they lag behind is because the service is perceived as worse. Amazon and Microsoft have well-established customer-development practices and they learn and resolve customers&#x27; issues. Having a good accessible support function is a great start to start listening to your clients but somehow in google culture they only want to look at aggregate statistics of a large userbase to learn something that customers are already trying to tell them through non-existing support channels.<p>For example, I&#x27;ve heard engineers complain about bad instances and intermittent networking issues. Concerns that I have never heard about in AWS except in the very early days of it.<p>I haven&#x27;t looked at GCP in a long time, but I remember everything being very python-centric and very lightly documented.<p>Winning in technology often comes down to having a serious customer-centric product management function.

&gt; Ultimately, the Google executives decided in the spring of 2018 that the cloud computing opportunity was simply too big to give up on.<p>All of the anecdotes in this article are from early to mid 2018.<p>So why is someone leaking these stores 18 months later?

This whole story seems weird and inconsistent, but particularly: “The pressure to show more progress very soon in the business extends to Google Cloud product teams, which the company is now asking to develop detailed multiyear strategic plans, a former Google Cloud employee said.”<p>Detailed multi-year strategic planning as a change from 18-month plans seems more consistent with a <i>recognition that significant progress on the obvious indicators is a long slog and that positioning for it is going to take tracking less direct indicators over a longer period</i> than it is with increased pressure for short-term results. Increased pressure for immediate results tends to be accompanied by reduced long-term planning.

Never used Google for anything important.<p>You&#x27;re cattle to Google. Their lack of customer support in literally every one of their offerings shows their approach to making money. They will shut you off in a heartbeat and you have no recourse except to email a bot. Ultimately your puny little shop doesn&#x27;t matter to their bottom line.

This has to be fake. With their reputation for killing off products this is asking for companies to drop their services.

I&#x27;m confused; is it realistic for any company to deprecate a product with $8B annual revenue? Compare to AWS, it is small but still significant even for Google. Compare this to YT, which annual revenue estimation is around $15B ~ $25B and CapEx&#x2F;OpEx is supposed to be very large.

&gt; If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely.<p>If I was a paranoid person, I might think this article is a sinister plan from Amazon or Microsoft. A quote like this can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: managers are already wary about GCP because of Google&#x27;s flaky reputation, hearing a quote like this could easily make it worse, and the lack of new business makes Google all the more likely to shut it down.

Bringing in an Oracle exec to run it seems pretty ill-advised. Oracle is a services company of the past - GCP needs to be a services company of the future as cliche as that is.<p>The tech is there - but alignment isnt. I dont know if Google is capable of anything outside of search.

I would be soooo pissed if this happened. So much for marrying GCP. AWS and Azure are so much worse though. The price of good software is clearly very high.

I don&#x27;t understand how an enterprise as big as google doesn&#x27;t have the energy to simply eat through time and money until it succeeds.<p>Even if the share has to be divided forever between 3 major cloud providers, it would eventually pay off.

If there was a betting marketplace for this, I would bet all my money against Google. Three years is nowhere near enough time for Google to catch up when the current situation is that they&#x27;re falling more behind every day.<p>They also have no way to fix the customer service issues plaguing every product of theirs, including their cloud stuff. So, so many stories about how bad they are.

The Google cemetery is calling... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gcemetery.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gcemetery.co&#x2F;</a>

This feels like a threat. Are they going to graveyard Google cloud? Probably not. But they&#x27;ve discontinued so many random, good services that I&#x27;m cautious to &#x27;learn&#x27; a new Google tool. I wouldn&#x27;t want to invest in a product only to be forced to transition to AWS in 3 years. Might as well just skip to AWS.

Even prior to this supposed leak, it would be really difficult as a developer to build anything reliant on Google&#x27;s technology stack. There is a huge number of killed projects; abandoned platforms; and projects like maps where low&#x2F; no fees have become prohibitively expensive.<p>Building atop Google is betting the farm on a fickle master.

These statements just made me remember a quote from Will ferrels movie. Ricky Bobby : Wait, Dad. Don&#x27;t you remember the time you told me &quot;If you ain&#x27;t first, you&#x27;re last&quot;?<p>Reese Bobby : Huh? What are you talking about, Son?<p>Ricky Bobby : That day at school.<p>Reese Bobby : Oh hell, Son, I was high that day. That doesn&#x27;t make any sense at all, you can be second, third, fourth... hell you can even be fifth.<p>Ricky Bobby : What? I&#x27;ve lived my whole life by that!<p>GCP is easy to use when compared to AWS according to me. I have used both the service providers. Starting with Firebase, Firebase hosting, App Engine, Compute Engine, GKE, BigQuery and monitoring via stackdriver. Everything just fits very well.<p>Number of people visiting their yearly Sessions are increasing and their training platforms(Qwiklabs &amp; YouTube videos) are very much precise. Most of the issues are solved in Stackoverflow itself and you have Google groups for each products.

I&#x27;m just flabbergasted this would even leak out. It will be a self fulfilling proficiency as prospective clients will shy away from Google. They must be doing damage control right now with all their latest enterprise clients who switched over. May as well start the clock on the Stadia death march. I give it 13 months.

There is NO WAY to retire Google Cloud...<p>This is the ultimate suicide you need to take to destroy public trust, once and for all.

They debated about it but it&#x27;s a nearly 10 bil per year business now. Why would they walk away from it now?

The Information is a fantastic source, and I subscribed to support the excellent original reporting that comes out of it. Most of the news will get disseminated by other blogs and news journals in the next day or so, but The Information is pretty good if you want tech news first.<p>A big nugget from behind the paywall: &quot;This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said.&quot;<p>The article also claims Google Cloud isn&#x27;t profitable under their current business plan: &quot;The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market.&quot;

Another way of looking at this. If you are shopping for a cloud platform Google is a really hard sell. On one hand you have Amazon who really paved the way here and literally built their company atop their platform and currently powers a huge piece of the web. On the other hand you have Microsoft who has decades of experience figuring out how to appeal to CEOs and enterprise customers and can dangle the prospects of integration with existing corporate infrastructure.<p>Google offers the Google name and a reputation for ditching services when the wind shifts. They really have little or no competitive advantage here. I&#x27;d personally rather build atop Linode or Digital Ocean than Google or at most, stick to the middle of the road, most generic parts of Google&#x27;s platform.

I made a joke years ago about how Google would shut down GCP on a whim, ending the last shred of goodwill they had in tech.<p>Too absurd for reality.

The thread is mostly concentrating on the negatives here. I&#x27;m hoping that GCP will offer some incentives for the next 3 years that I could take advantage of to help my side gig grow on the cheap! If they die in 3 years, well I don&#x27;t rally care as I have no clue if I&#x27;ll have a business in the next 12 month.<p>Of course, this article does say &quot;The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies&quot; with emphasis on &quot;big&quot;, but maybe there will be some trickle down for the small fry amongst it all.

There&#x27;s no way for Google Cloud to achieve this. Even if Google does everything <i>perfectly</i>, both AWS and Azure are just too entrenched to be dethroned in such a short period of time.<p>Therefore, this story is almost equivalent to saying &#x27;Google will ignore cloud from 2023 onward&#x27;. Were I ever to consider GCP, this alone would cause me to run far far away.<p><i>If</i> Google is serious at all about cloud, it would issue a quick denial. If it does not, well, it would be evidence in favour of the story&#x27;s credibility.

&quot;Last quarter, nearly all of the company’s $40.5 billion in revenue came from advertising. Meanwhile, a collection of newer businesses that Alphabet lumps together as “other bets” in its financial statements, including the self-driving car unit Waymo, generated a mere $155 million in revenue while incurring operating losses of nearly $1 billion.&quot;<p>This is purposefully misleading.<p>From the Q3 2019 10-Q: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;ix?doc=&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1652044&#x2F;000165204419000032&#x2F;goog10-qq32019.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;ix?doc=&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1652044&#x2F;0001...</a><p>Ad revenue: 33.9B Other revenue: 6.4B<p>&quot;Google other revenues consist primarily of revenues from: Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store; Google Cloud offerings; Hardware; and YouTube subscriptions.&quot;<p>&quot;Other revenues&quot; is up nearly 40% q&#x2F;q compared to Q3 2018:<p>&quot;Our Google other revenues increased $1,788 million and $4,639 million from the three and nine months ended September 30, 2018 to the three and nine months ended September 30, 2019, respectively. The growth was primarily driven by revenues from Google Cloud offerings as well as revenues from Google Play, largely relating to in-app purchases (revenues which we recognize net of payout to developers).&quot;

If a company like Westfield decides to get out of the leasing business, it makes sure its anchor tenants know there is some continuity of lease for their locations, because the value inherent in the property is the lease stability of the anchor tenant.<p>I begin to wonder if cloud has a parallel here: Does Google actually need, for selfish reasons, to inform significant cloud tenants in GCP that continuity of their business is core, and will be factored into any business development, or retiral, or sale options?<p>Elastic Search comes to mind: If you build to a dependency on Elastic, in GCP, its comforting to know it works in AWS but they are not an entirely identical product. From a business continuity model, mostly the same. Different tokens, different backend underneat the ES componentry. Does it matter? Depends how critical Clous ES is to your business.

The current issue with many cloud providers today is that they had designed all these fantastic features but then completely left it up to the customers to figure out new use cases on their own. They forgot that the majority of customers don&#x27;t have much clue about the cloud let alone those advanced features, and cloud providers are sitting here complaining that they are running out of patience waiting for customers to get on board. Designing new features alone is not enough, they must also design the actual use cases to convince customers because most of them don&#x27;t have any clue of how to actually turn those advanced cloud services into something more useful than just hosting. It&#x27;s not a capability issue but rather it&#x27;s a use case problem.

Google* isnt really an enterprise focused company. Getting talent and management to work on it must be tough, and internally I&#x27;ve heard it is sort of looked down on. They have a pretty poor partner network as well. I think if they beefed that up theyd do well.

Cloud is not about developers anymore: is not about tech. Why? Because enterprises understand that the foundation for their apps exists, if not their Cloud reps will listen and develop it for them as long as you are big big contract. Now the power relies all along in decision makers, Google reputation is not good there. Getting Fortune 500, Government contracts is very very very unlikely as in reality from Cx0 perspective...AWS&#x2F;Microsoft have been there always...new things in Infrastructure...probably not unless you really don&#x27;t want to give any business to AWS (Walmart&#x2F;Target) and experimenting the new enterprise Google...no thanks

I have thought at times that HN was a place of rational, deep discussion. I cant understand where these types of endless emotional rantings come from. Everyone is going with a bigger hyperbole how &quot;Google is killing GCP, they r so dum&quot;.<p>I can understand their ambitious plans, and naturally you decrease funding for a project if it keeps hemorrhaging money. It says the Google C-suite discussed the idea of leaving the market, as any rational person would do, but dismissed it. I think the way article describes these things is putting a whole of color on this.<p>But so what, Google thinks it can beat AWS and Azure? Well, it&#x27;s good they have big goals. Such a heavy bet on their cloud business seems quite sensible, and while they mention cutting spending if they don&#x27;t achieve those goals, I don&#x27;t see it as a big of problem as people seem to think. I mean other cloud providers don&#x27;t even <i>have</i> that amount of money to put into their cloud businesses&#x27; and no one is lamenting about that.<p>To me this whole debate should be about how impractical and out of touch with customers Google has become since.. I can&#x27;t even recall. Maybe it&#x27;s the algorithm-based engineer interviews but something&#x27;s wrong with Google&#x27;s internal workings. Google Analytics&#x27; dashboard is still terrible, I don&#x27;t like even how Google Docs work, Youtube is I guess ok but they blundered the live-streaming et cetera. I&#x27;ve never used GCP but it always seemed a bit too over-designed and flashy and, well, not practical. On the other hand AWS&#x27;s console, even though it is at times unintuitive it feels for some reason quite nice and practical. It&#x27;s weird and subjective, I know.<p>Could it be that when I had my first touch with AWS I had been given a quite positive view of the whole service vs. I have quite negative prior feelings about other Google services that cloud my judgement. Who knows.<p>Yet still, perhaps Googlers at their fancy Mountain View office have become a bit too detached from the regular Joes working for their gray corporate masters who want nothing to do with their hipster dashboards and just want something simple that works. Maybe pride comes before a fall, like with Microsoft. Luckily for MSFT Nadella started to change their culture.

As someone who literally have a decision to make tomorrow for a large move from Azure&#x2F;Hosted to consolidate GCP I may have to send a few email to postpone that meeting... This is really bad for GCP

Why would they even care about ‘winning’ the cloud? To what end? Google is officially and advertising company, and the large majority of their revenue depends on it.<p>This strategy is working so well for them, I just don’t see why they would even care about grinding out a little extra market share in the cloud hosting space. Why? Maybe just to boost their ego?<p>Is it really worth it to them? Whatever comparatively small amount of extra revenue they squeeze out will still be dwarfed by the ad revenue. I imagine they will continue doing what they do.

They would have to bring something far more compelling compared to AWS if they are to gain much market share. Either in terms features or notable cost difference. Technical people with a general mistrust of them go into planning with GCP as a hesitant second or third choice. The traditional IT departments moving to Azure aren&#x27;t going to consider the other vendors much when there&#x27;s such a direct migration. Combined with headcount and capital cost reduction so clearly mapped out for them.

Have they considered making their pricing easier to understand, or did they collectively decide that the AWS model of &quot;Good luck understanding your bill!&quot; is a good one?

Maybe they could consider applying more reasonable pricing?<p>E.g. Hetzner offers an 8-core 128GB Xeon SkyLake machine with unlimited 1gbps traffic for around $120&#x2F;month while Google offers n1-highmem-8 with 8 cores and 52GB and no traffic for $240&#x2F;month.<p>1gbps unlimited traffic on Hetzner means 324 TB&#x2F;month, which would cost 26000$ on GCP at the lowest 0.08$&#x2F;GB rate.<p>So I would consider cutting the instance prices by half, and dividing the bandwidth prices by 1000, and then they will be competitive.

For what it&#x27;s worth, I&#x27;ve had nothing but positive experiences with GCP plus TFRC: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tensorflow.org&#x2F;tfrc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tensorflow.org&#x2F;tfrc</a><p>(If I had negative experiences, believe me, I&#x27;d be the first to point them out. Just a happy user.)<p>There are a few annoying aspects of GCP, but the complexity seems roughly equal to AWS. Both have their pain points.<p>The $300 free credit is immensely helpful. I hope Google keeps it.

We use almost every cloud.<p>Currently I see<p>GCP TPU options beat the pants off of everyone. I love bigquery.<p>Azure has by far the best storage options. The bucket storage is much cheaper. The azure file storage is best of class. I don&#x27;t like it&#x27;s bigquery&#x2F;athena alternatives<p>AWS is the incumbent, I love the spot market, but more and more we have just been running low end workloads there. Athena is the best of class of analytics tools if your data is already in a bucket.<p>We are firing up our IBM cloud presence now.

Off topic: The link for this article is,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;google-brass-set-202...</a> ?pu=hackernewsyw3xln&amp;utm_source=hackernews&amp;utm_medium=unlock<p>How did it end up with utm_source=hackernews in the url? Dang is this something you change or is it user submitted?

Does this mean google cloud is closing by that date?<p>What isn’t google going to close?<p>Would it be reasonable to now run a headline “Google to close cloud in 2023 following failure to dominate”

Wow, this seriously highlights Google&#x27;s lack of understanding regarding enterprise customers. Enterprise purchase decisions I&#x27;ve been a part of place stability and the long term partnership way above cutting edge tech or price. It takes about 2 seconds to extrapolate all of the internal investments you&#x27;d have to scrap in 4 years if Google decides to defund GCP.

Only way Google perhaps can take a lead in Cloud is if they invent a new paradigm - quantum cloud or something (just to illustrate the point). That is, change the game and not change themselves for the current game.<p>Google just can&#x27;t compete with hustlers like Amazon, Alibaba and to some extent Microsoft (ex-Oracle leader not withstanding). Cloud business is commodity operational business.

Has this become just a commodity war, or are there major sustainably exclusive technology&#x2F;IP advantages that define the competition (e.g. processor, hypervisor, database, CDN, OS license)? It seems like third-party suppliers are chipping away at leads in each of these. Is UX or lock-in a significant differentiatior? What is it that defines this business?

I&#x27;m doubtful if cloud would be as profitable business in 2023 as it is now. Race to the bottom is already in place and only bound to accelerate further. This is like Microsoft determines to win the phone market in 2015 when iPhone peaked up the steam. By 2015, the smartphone market is changed dramatically.

What is funny is the link reads as &quot;google-reportedly-wants-to-be-top-two-player-in-cloud-by-2023.html&quot;

Knowing that there is a risk of being de-platformed and loosing all your client data, and not being able to offer your service, etc, is a deterrent for most people, Google has a very difficult job here to change and then communicate the way they will deal with users will not be like gmail or YouTube.

This reminds me of Google+. I remember one year where they got very serious about G+, tied bonuses to the growth, and otherwise tried to take on Facebook. G+ is shuttered now, but at least I have a cool green check mark next to my name I&#x27;m my YouTube comments... :-)

Well, it&#x27;s pretty obvious Google wont be able to beat either AWS or Azure in the next few years... How can information like this leak or even be entertained internally? Google is famous for terminating, even successful products. Best to stay far away from GCP!

People want to develop their tech on an open platform without vendor lock-in. If they pushed an open source platform on top of Kubernetes I know I would be more interested and comfortable using them. Right now I just don&#x27;t see a strong benefit over others.

i run a bunch of services for some online social clubs and foss projects that i&#x27;m involved in. i&#x27;ve floated between a bunch of different service providers (Digital Ocean, Scaleway, Hetzner, Joyent Public Cloud, Vultr, and Linode to name a few) and now i&#x27;m working on setting up some colo infrastructure. i&#x27;ll probably keep some of the cloud stuff around for failover and maybe some edge cache type stuff, but you don&#x27;t really need cloud unless you have extremely variable loads on your system.<p>i won&#x27;t say cloud isn&#x27;t nice, i&#x27;ve been able to learn a lot by playing around with cloud servers. just good to remember that cloud isn&#x27;t the only option for a lot of workloads.

offer Spanner at low cost as a loss leader that would def offer something no other cloud has.

Would this also put a meta deadline on Stadia since, I assume, Stadia utilizes Google Cloud?

#1 or #2 seems like such an arbitrary objective.<p>Besides the notion of Google not investing in cloud seems rather ludicrous to me. They might as well formally announce that they&#x27;re not competing in tech going forward &amp; just count adtech dollars instead.

It would be funny if Google started using AWS instead of their own datacenters. While the compute capacity per space unit have kept growing exponentially, growth has stagnated as they already got 100% market reach.

It would be the ultimate Google move to sunset GCP. Literally no product they provide is safe.

A business like Google Cloud would not be wound down, it would be sold. MS and Amazon woulc not be allowed to buy it for antitrust issues, so potential buyers might include Rackspace and Apple, among others.

Sorry Google, you need a time machine to fix this one.<p>No one trusts your products to stick around or has the confidence that you won&#x27;t shut down their accounts overnight due to an automation thinking something is wrong.

I&#x27;ll wait for more information before ditching Google Cloud, but this will certainly speed up getting a fall-back&#x2F;migration plan together for what we&#x27;ve got on the service.

Not surprised. I think we have to get out of GCS as soon as possible.

So this is a PR disaster for GCP. Already people are penciling out contingency plans because this inept leak. And Google&#x27;s history of shuttering stuff really doesn&#x27;t help.

Google brass just fell off and reshuffled at the very top?<p>I think it&#x27;s prudent to give them some time for internal dust to settle before buying into &quot;conquer the world&quot; deadlines.

There is at least one way Google can get out of this mess:<p>1) Do serverless through standards and avoid vendor lock-in<p>There&#x27;s a huge opportunity for a cloud vendor who has a credible zero lock-in offering.

Also they just hired a new guy to head up GCP from Oracle, I doubt someone like that would join if there was even a hint of there not being 100% commitment to GCP in the air.

Dream on, Goog. You&#x27;re third in a three-horse race. You need a serious, and I mean <i>serious</i> value add to beat Amazon in a LOB where they bring their A game.

After this leak they should probably go ahead and turn it off.

Having extensively used AWS, and having spent a considerable amount of time with GCP, I think AWS is the superior product for the vast majority of enterprises.

I’m a fan of BigQuery and by extension GCP. I find it simpler to use than AWS but AWS has more to offer I think. It’s good to have competition in the space.

&gt; to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively<p>Does that imply that Microsoft is first and Amazon is second? That is surprising to me.

&gt; Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share<p>Isn’t this backwards? I thought aws was quite a bit bigger than azure.

I’m guessing this is a cloud compute only decision and does not include Google Apps... I cant imagine them pulling out of Google Apps.

this is weird,<p>GOOGLE: we want to to be in the top 2 or we will throw our toys and leave &#x2F; defund.<p>EVERYONE ELSE BITTEN BY GOOGLE DISCONTINUING STUFF: errrr, why would I EVER choose you guys to host my stuff NOW unless you are ridiculously cheap and it would be super simple to switch to azure&#x2F;aws.<p>heck if I was using them now, and saw this, I&#x27;d be making plans&#x2F;contingencies to shift off them.

Where would that would leave kubernetes? would they scale down their investment on kubernetes and all asociated project like knative ?

It&#x27;s a bit odd that the products like Kubernetes came from Google Cloud but they themselves are struggling in the market.

Google is an ad company with negligible business success outside of ad-tech. This should be clear by now for everybody.

GCP is more customizable&#x2F;better for edge cases of power users, but AWS is better for something like 90% of users

It&#x27;s crazy what Google is willing to kill. I mean if GCloud gets shut down, what hope is there for Stadia?

Its a very practical decision, but it becoming public totally screws GCP&#x27;s credibility in the market

How can they invent Kubernetes and be so clueless about the Cloud from non technical point of view???

These cloud players need to reduce prices. AWS has not significantly reduced prices in a long time.

If I wasn’t using it before, then I sure am not going to start now, knowing it’s under the gun

This sounds like an empty New Years resolution, but perhaps they have a well thought out plan.

GCP generates $8B annually. It&#x27;s a bit dramatic to think Google will give up on GCP. AWS has a loyal customer base, which is well deserved, but Google does have some unique products (like Spanner) that AWS may never have. Point being there will always be a place in the market for GCP.

Do people actually believe GCP is at risk of shutting down? What nonsense.

Google can keep its cloud and I&#x27;ll keep my data. Its the best way.

Is hacker News turning into Reddit with all these comments?

Why is this up for a debate? Is it not profitable already?

I have sometimes wondered why they don&#x27;t offer a separate, uncomplicated fixed price (and bounded resource) version - basically like a Heroku - and provide a migration path to their core offerings.

The Google Cloud employees should unionize.

Well first they need to get out of beta!

What would this mean for the NYC office?

Google needs to buy Cloudflare.

do better with trust and your care of enployees than amazon does. thats an easy win

DEPRECATION NOTICE

Non-paywalled link?

I still lay claim that google is not hiring the talent that they think they are or claim to be. With such huge budgets and failed product after failed product one has to wonder what is the genesis of their failings. Having met countless arrogant but mediocre engineers that leave Google after four years, I will bring up the old algorithms only hiring nets bad employees with good memories.

If they&#x27;re going aggressively for market share this could only mean one thing: price war. They&#x27;ve been running (and cost-optimizing) cloud services for much longer than Amazon or Microsoft, so they could actually make it _really_ painful for the other two players, and they know it. Most of all, they could undercut them on egress pricing. I&#x27;m all for it. The current pricing in all three clouds is nuts.

One of the great downsides of Google having such a massive hit with Search is that they don’t have the kind of willpower that it takes to absorb defeat after defeat on the path to victory. Look at how many failed fucking pen devices Microsoft has shipped, since Windows CE. They don’t cut funding, they just keep going and going and going. Google doesn’t do this.

&quot;Google brass&quot; are basically Alec Baldwin&#x27;s soulless asshole character from GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS:<p>&quot;We&#x27;re adding a little something to this month&#x27;s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize&#x27;s a set of steak knives. Third prize is you&#x27;re fired.&quot;

I actually don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s what happened at all. Best I can tell, this was a multi-year, aggressive, OKR-like goal. You&#x27;re not expected to 100% achieve your OKRs at Google. 100% on everything indicates your OKRs are not aggressive enough and you&#x27;re sandbagging. You&#x27;re merely saying: &quot;I think this is worth doing and I&#x27;ll commit serious effort to achieving this&quot;. I don&#x27;t know why people are concluding that if world domination doesn&#x27;t happen by 2023 Google will set its cloud datacenters on fire.<p>Or, to be perfectly honest, I do know: it&#x27;s to drive outrage and clicks.<p>Google is not going shutter any business which brings in more than $1B in profit per year. It never has, and it never will.<p>Disclosure: ex-Googler, GCP user, hold no position in company stock.

Point to remember- they are number 4. And beating a fast rising azure is going to be close to impossible.

Good luck to them.<p>For my personal projects, GCP is definitely my preference although I also like AWS and enjoyed using Azure while I had a Microsoft BizSpark grant. GCP is very easy to use.<p>For huge customers GCP provides good support, but I think that the GCP team really have to work harder to support small companies (I base this on HN comments, no personal experience).

The engineers from Amazon, Google and Microsoft should get together and make sure they&#x27;re all using different metrics for success, so they can all be first at the same time. Or work out a schedule for who will be first which year.

I have a hard time believing articles from sources with no track record making bold claims. Seriously, &quot;theinformation.com&quot; and hardly anyone is skeptical?