
Google Cloud CEO says that he’s borrowing from the Oracle playbook - tosh
https://www.businessinsider.de/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kurian-oracle-strategies-2019-4
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danpalmer
It sounds like he's mostly taking the "good bits" – scaling the sales teams to
be closer to those of competitors, and making the product offering more
compelling for enterprise customers.

As a Google Cloud customer, I really hope that he doesn't take the "bad bits"
– raising prices, unnecessary lock-in, slow moving technology, litigation. As
an engineer in a team where engineers lead decisions like which cloud provider
to use, rather than some exec on the golf course, I hope they keep their
appeal to those customers who don't want to play the enterprise sales game.

~~~
hammock
Can you elaborate on what it takes to "make the product offering more
compelling for enterprise customers"? Is it a marketing exercise?

~~~
idunno246
No. Their enterprise support is not great, they happily leave bugs in
production unless you complain loud enough, their user management and security
policies don’t really scale to large orgs. It’s really not a great experience
as an enterprise compared to other clouds, they don’t seem to really care
about you

~~~
danpalmer
> their user management and security policies don’t really scale to large orgs

Really? This is interesting. I am not working in a large org, but all of the
issues we've had with their user management have essentially come down to it
being designed for companies much larger than we are, with much more complex
security requirements.

Can you elaborate on what doesn't scale? What sort of requirements are they
not meeting? Is it _targeting_ large orgs and getting it wrong, or is it
targeting too-small orgs in your opinion?

~~~
idunno246
just a couple examples:

the default service account is a project editor, which is insanely over-
privileged, yet everything tries to use it, and all the demos. Appengine only
supports one service account for all apps, even if you have multiple apps,
also Editor. similar things in gke.

Their pre-defined roles are a mess, and not consistent across services. Theres
a role called 'dataflow admin' defined as the 'minimal permissions to run a
job' which isn't what id call admin.

So if you try to use custom roles instead, cause the predefined roles are
crazy, they will make breaking changes to permissions(literally did this last
week with no notice).

Support access doesnt use IAM and only supports users, not groups, and no api
- you have to go to a web form and add each user individually. good luck if
you have more than a couple users, and have fun trying to keep that in sync.

The fact that its tied to gsuite is a problem as well, a gsuite admin is also
a gcp admin, which is generally owned by different orgs(IT vs dev).

it seems like every month we have a new breaking change, or price change(maps
is biting us constantly for some reason)

ultimately what it comes down to is weve been burned enough that we dont trust
google

~~~
danpalmer
Thanks, lots of good details, this does make sense.

We have hit a few of these. I hadn't even thought about the GSuite/GCP
crossover – that's kind of good for us, but yeah in a larger company I guess
they would be totally different orgs.

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thesausageking
I was very surprised Diane Greene was pushed out and then Google brought in an
exec from Oracle of all places. No CIO wants to hear a vendor is following the
Oracle playbook which is basically: hire really aggressive sales people who
overpromise and win deals at any cost, and then, when customers are locked in,
make them pay through the nose for it.

~~~
vl
She was pushed out for her support of the DOD deal. Once she made this
“mistake in judgement” the writing was on the wall.

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Twirrim
"Kurian estimated to the Journal that Google Cloud's sales team is only
between one-tenth and one-fifteenth the size of the sales teams at Amazon Web
Services and Microsoft Azure. But he's planning to ramp up this tiny fraction,
with goals of making Google Cloud's sales teams half the size of its peers"

That's a small sales force. You can build solid products, but you've got to
have a sales force to go with it. Amazon had advantages as the first big mover
in the cloud market. If you're coming in later, you've _got_ to be able to
sell.

~~~
HillRat
I can say that Google is never even at the table for large-scale cloud
migration strategies (though, to be fair, neither is Oracle). But their
offerings also lack Amazon’s powerful first-mover advantage or Microsoft’s
ecosystem and developer reach. Beyond that it’s not evident that Google knows
how to /support/ enterprise customers, let alone sell to them. It’s going to
take more than adding a bunch of enterprise sales teams for them to make GCP a
serious contender.

~~~
adventured
To make matters worse, Larry Page has no demonstrated skill (expertise,
history, success, et al) when it comes to competing in enterprise. He has no
idea what to do. If he did, they wouldn't be where they are now in cloud.
People widely dislike Ellison for understandable reasons, and yet he's an
animal at doing all the things you have to to win in enterprise. From sales to
the conferences to the non-stop public touting and everything in-between. Page
isn't even in the same galaxy as Ellison when it comes to understanding how to
fight it out in enterprise. Further to that point, he simply has no personal
interest in it, clearly. There's nobody at the top in Google that knows how to
compete in that arena. Amazon and Microsoft will continue to perpetually eat
their lunch accordingly. Bezos personally promoted AWS in the early days, he
knew the opportunity and was willing to work to capture it. Even Ballmer for
all his faults as a tech CEO, coming from a sales background - and
understanding enterprise well - he understood and was fine with Microsoft
having to roll up its sleeves to compete in pursuit of the cloud opportunity.
The rolling Google Cloud disaster starts at the very top.

~~~
HillRat
That’s an excellent point — I can name multiple cases when Ellison personally
sold $x00mm deals to CEOs at (quite literally) baseball games, and Nadella has
made personal pitches for Azure for major opportunities, but are
Page/Brin/Pichai going to do c-suite grip and grins? Doesn’t seem like their
strong suit, and it would require a strategic-level bet on enterprise that I
just don’t think they’re willing to make, given the fact that adtech is their
major cash cow.

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sokoloff
I can think of no worse way to entice technologists to flock to your cloud
platform than to announce that you're "borrowing from the Oracle playbook"...

~~~
stingraycharles
This is sensationalist. Reading the article, it seems like he's going to
invest much more in an aggressive sales team, which they desperately need.

Google Cloud sucks at enterprise sales. By all objective measures, Oracle
absolutely owns this part. It's not as black and white as they need to
_become_ Oracle in order to learn some things from them.

As someone who consults with a lot of enterprises and helps them with their
cloud architecture, I can see first hand that the market share of Google Cloud
there is about 0. It's only internal, toy projects and nothing critical,
because they already have AWS and Azure and that's that.

Even with all their technological excellence, it doesn't matter. That strategy
failed, and they're losing.

I'm willing to wait and see how a sales-centric strategy works out.

~~~
_the_inflator
I agree with you. Google needs to learn the good parts from Oracle.

Enterprise adoption != developer adoption.

That's why Google desperately needs a strong sales team.

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noego
> _Kurian plans to have Google Cloud ... develop new technology that allows
> programmers to develop applications that run on all three clouds_

As a heavy AWS user, this part actually excites me. Avoiding vendor-lock-in is
something I value highly. I would also be a lot more willing to try GCP if I
didn't have to invest effort into building a GCP-specific stack. This would
also be a huge win for all cloud customers by making the marketplace more
competitive.

~~~
stingraycharles
The biggest AWS lock-in for enterprises is IAM, though. Will be interesting to
see how they are planning to pull that off.

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bitL
I can't help myself being sarcastic - to me it looks like Google doesn't
really want others to use their great cloud/ML tech, keeping that advantage to
themselves, but are pressured by stock market/board etc. so they have to offer
it somehow. So the best strategy would be to hire people with deeply
dysfunctional mindset acting as repellents of decision makers to keep that
unit perpetually underwhelming.

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maxclark
Google and Google Cloud culture is ingrained and very specific. Was in a
meeting to move >$10 mill/year in spend over and the account director
literally walked out for an hour. The entire process was just insane and
ultimately GCP changed negotiated terms at the last minute and lost the
business. I would be very careful about trusting them as a sole cloud
provider.

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biosed
I work for a FTSE 100 company and we recently completed a POC on GCP.

The sales guy was/is pushy but tbh the tech is very prescriptive on how things
are done, it's the Google way or it doesn't work. That is not how enterprise
works, you need to adapt to each customer.

We have lots of AWS and plan on using it more, we might be doing it sub
optimally but it works.

~~~
BoorishBears
To me that sounds like a great way to ensure the least amount of gnashing of
teeth for your engineers, your sales team, and your customers.

 _Either do it right, or don 't use us_ sounds very good.

And if their "doing it right" really is right they'll end up with better
outcomes for customers who stick with them, which will drive them ending up
with more customers.

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mtw
I'm using Google Maps platform for various tasks such as geocoding. This
article sounds very hostile for indie developers like me. I also hope he
doesn't get his hands on Tensorflow - a bit like Oracle got their hands on
Java/MySQL and started suing people for various usage of Java.

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rb808
I think its worth reading the original WSJ article if you can. I can only see
the first few lines which are:

> Weeks into his new job as head of Google’s cloud business, Thomas Kurian
> identified a chief complaint from big business customers: They often didn’t
> have account managers to call.

Oracle is famous for getting customers to pay, but they were also very good at
helping customers with services, advice and customizations. Expensive
Consultants worked closely with dev teams. Yes they were expensive, but
clients knew they could rely on someone from Oracle fix bugs or give guidance.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-been-lacking-at-
googles-c...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-been-lacking-at-googles-
cloud-enough-humans-11554724802)

~~~
justinclift
> Yes they were expensive, but clients knew they could rely on someone from
> Oracle fix bugs or give guidance.

Not sure how true that is. Plenty of horror stories around of Oracle bugs not
being fixed.

~~~
eitally
Oracle's enterprise support is absolutely fantastic. They will not hesitate to
put someone on literally the next plane, fly them to your site, and sit them
there until your problem is resolved. Yes, that is expensive, but you're
buying peace of mind.

The above does not necessarily apply to bugs and feature requests, just
operational support.

~~~
justinclift
> They will not hesitate to put someone on literally the next plane...

Definitely have heard cases of that happening, with large enough accounts.

But also plenty of stories of problems being ignored, same as Google Cloud has
a reputation for. :(

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dspillett
Careful copying from Oracle, they are famously litigious even when no one in
their right mind thinks that they've got a genuine case...

~~~
scarmig
Google may already be familiar with Oracle's litigiousness.

~~~
dspillett
I suspect so too.

(for those wondering: we are being a tad facetious as everyone who has been in
the industry a while is familiar with stories of Oracle being litigious, one
case specifically being a large and long-running one against Google over Java
and Android:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.))

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PedroBatista
So will Google start to pay bribes to big wigs and government people ( start..
lol ) in order to gain contracts?

They are investing greatly in Kubernetes but it seems still a long way to go
before the lock-in is achieved, so they can use more Oracle tricks.

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olliej
Careful they probably patented it :D

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microdrum
That's great, but Google seeks to compete with and destroy many users of GCP.
I spoke with a pharma CEO who, having no background in cloud, said
straightforwardly that he would never even consider letting workloads onto
GCP. Google as a business can't be trusted. It's like FedEx deciding to make
widgets after seeing how many widgets get shipped. Oracle never did that.
Google does it all the time.

~~~
mixmastamyk
It's hard to imagine G moving into big pharma, but do tell.

~~~
pinewurst
Look at their "Other Bets".

