
Google’s cloud business under Greene was plagued by internal clashes - kanishkdudeja
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/21/google-cloud-plagued-by-internal-clashes-in-its-effort-to-catch-amazon.html
======
crazygringo
This just feels like an internally contradictory hit piece...

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".

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.

~~~
Eridrus
I think everyone agrees that AWS is a clear leader, but both Microsoft and
Google report bundled Office Suite/Cloud Computing revenue as a single number,
so it's completely unclear who is actually in second place.

~~~
partiallypro
I wish this falsehood would die. Google isn't even #3 in cloud revenues, IBM
is, Oracle is #4. Google is far, far, behind Azure and AWS. They have
~$1B/quarter in cloud revenues (that includes GSuite.) Even if you made the
assumption that Office 365 made up 80% of Microsoft's quarterly cloud revenues
it would still be bigger than Google's cloud (including GSuite.) This is based
on their earnings fy 2018.

I don't get why people are in denial that Azure is doing well. If you want to
know why Google isn't doing -great- in the cloud, it's because people are
afraid they will kill the project. It's because they don't have a "hook" like
AWS and Azure have. AWS has a massive user base already, good reason to adopt
it. Azure hooks into so many other Microsoft services and developer tools,
good reason to adopt it. GCS has...what? Sure, some cool things, but we're
talking about compute, compute where where the money is. Even if you adopt GCS
for some edge or AI projects, that's not a lot of spend.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
> GCS has...what?

The best Kubernetes hosting?

~~~
partiallypro
A tool that arguably 99% of people don't need and is even up for constant
debate here on HN.

------
0xCMP
Interesting, I'm in the US and I think of GCP as the best of the three
factoring cost and reliability of their features.

For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do
it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings.

For Google you may not want to get locked in, but the offerings seem to offer
some really good benefits and work correctly.

Maybe this is just "grass is greener" thinking, but what is the experience
using GCP like?

~~~
threeseed
> For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do
> it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings.

So our company spends tens of millions a month with AWS across our 50+ teams.

Never once heard of AWS services not working and never once saw people needing
to roll their own replacement Redis, PostgreSQL or ElasticSearch instances.
And at least with AWS you have options to have these managed services where as
the product offering from GCP is extremely limited. Not to mention that GCP is
absent entirely from the serverless discussion which is a game changer.

Can you be more specific as to why GCP implements things correctly and AWS
doesn't ?

~~~
rhodysurf
Arent GAE and FireBase part of GCP which are both very much serverless
products?

~~~
dboreham
And GCF

------
stingraycharles
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.

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).

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.

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".

What are HN's thought about this?

(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.)

EDIT: Did not expect this topic to be downvoted this far. Is this not an
appropriate discussion / violate any rules?

[1] "Law of Duality" [https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-
Violate/d...](https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-
Violate/dp/0887306667)

~~~
Already__Taken
1\. Google will do this anyway, because it's not going to run on AWS or azure,
so why not keep some skin in the game?

2\. Isn't k8s a play to reinvent this space?

~~~
lbriner
1\. Because it is a very different thing to have an internally managed cloud
than it is to offer this as a product with the massive support required for
enterprise, something that Google has never put much resource into.

Amazon and MS have vast support networks because enterprise wants to feel like
they have some control and feedback on their systems.

Also, unless you can innovate in the space (or go really cheap), why would I
ever choose a smaller player over a larger one?

This is another example of the problem these rich companies have where cash is
not a problem but identity and direction is.

~~~
halbritt
There are technical reasons.

Azure is doing quite well leveraging Microsoft's existing enterprise
relationships. I'm not sure how much success folks are having "lifting and
shifting" their Microsoft infrastructure into the cloud, some, maybe?

However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type
architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.

~~~
colemickens
>However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type
architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.

Extremely unsurprising, but I'd be interested to read more.

~~~
halbritt
Kind of ignored this because it's a long list of stuff. I don't really want to
repeat stuff that I've "heard". Friend of mine does consulting for a few big
orgs, and he tells me that things are bad enough that many of his customers
are looking to move in spite of being heavily subsidized by Microsoft. He
mentioned numbers like >$1m in credits. Unfortunately, my friend isn't very
technical so when I press him on details, I get very little.

However, that correlates pretty closely with my own personal experience. I've
worked with a fair bit of the Azure products and it feels to me very much like
a work in progress.

The identity management stuff has been a moving target since day one. That is,
how to authorize against the service itself. This is apparent in many of the
Python libraries where this is documented.

The Python libraries that I've seen look like they were produced by interns.
I'm performance with ADL is pretty rough.

My main goal with Azure was to deploy Kubernetes clusters there. The list of
problems is very long and has been documented ad nauseum in many Medium
articles. In the 14 or so months I've been working with Azure, it hasn't
improved as quickly as I'm accustomed to with AWS and GCP.

A year ago, I shifted the majority of my production infrastructure from AWS to
GCP. By comparison to Azure, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of
the products from GCP. My company uses GSuite which made identity management
and RBAC a breeze. The GKE product is way, way better than anything else, and
there are a handful of things that I like better than AWS.

I wouldn't encourage anyone to shift from AWS unless they were planning a
large Kubernetes implementation. I would encourage folks to try GCP and
especially GKE to get a sense of the differences.

There's nothing about Azure that I've discovered yet that would cause me to
recommend it to anyone. It's possible that if a company had a heavier
investment in MS products that it might be worthwhile, but that's not the case
for mine. We only ever use MSSQL occasionally for development purposes and
I've found that I can spin up an instance of that quite nicely in k8s with the
Microsoft authored helm chart.

------
seanhunter
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.

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?).

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.

~~~
zeristor
"GCP is globally in 4th place behind AWS, Azure and Alibaba cloud."

Maybe GCP should be renamed to something beginning with 'A'?

~~~
nicoburns
Alphabet Cloud?

~~~
philsnow
Needs a pithy TLA. Alphabet Business Cloud / ABC?

------
remote_phone
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.

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.

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.

~~~
princetman
That’s a little harsh. I mean hindsight is always 20-20. Under her leadership
Google Cloud did acquire big name customers. Google’s struggle to gain
foothold in enterprises and reasons are well discussed on various HN threads
over years. It’s a lot to expect from one executive to turn it around in face
of fierce competition.

~~~
shanghaiaway
No, that's exactly what should be expected from a CEO.

~~~
princetman
And she did deliver, a lot[0].

 _After Diane took over the reins, Google Cloud managed to get solid
enterprise wins. 20th Century Fox, Colgate, Disney, eBay, HSBC, LATAM
Airlines, LG CNS, The Home Depot, The New York Times, Schlumberger, Target and
Verizon are some of the key enterprises using Google Cloud.

The most notable win for Google Cloud came from Twitter which has moved large-
scale Hadoop clusters to GCP, with a total of about 300 PB of data migrated.

Netflix, a loyal AWS customer, is using Google Cloud Platform for disaster
recovery and business continuity.

Google Cloud made impressive progress in establishing itself as an enterprise
cloud platform._

[0]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-
diane-green-transformed-google-cloud-business/amp/)

~~~
paganel
She should of at least help Google Cloud out-compete Microsoft, which
apparently they didn't. And I can partially see why, because in the market
where I'm located (Eastern-Europe, a reasonably well-developed IT market) MS
has become very, very aggressive in selling Azure, it has been that way for
the last 3 years (I'd say), for them it's "sell Azure first and then
everything else will follow", while I haven't even heard of Google Cloud being
mentioned as a cloud alternative because their sales people are missing. For
the record I know people who sell IT solutions for both enterprise and
Government entities.

Maybe in the States or in other parts of Europe the situation is different and
Google does indeed push their cloud solution down clients' throats but over-
here they're absent.

~~~
vukk
Europe a separate discussion from the US, as far as I know the problem is that
Google refuses to sign any kind of guarantees that the data doesn't leave the
EU. Probably because hosting companies that have US DCs can be compelled to
give up data from EU datacenters too by the USgovt.

Microsoft does give those guarantees, it has a weird setup with Deutsche
Telekom operating their datacenters.

So institutions like universities can't necessarily use Google cloud services.
Even consultancies aren't necessarily so hot on providing Google cloud stuff,
as some customers can't use them. All this, however, is anecdotal.

You can read more on HN, e.g.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16858597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16858597)

~~~
Macacity
Yes, but this setup with Deutsche Telekom will end in 2019 and does not accept
new customers.

------
beauzero
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.

~~~
mips_avatar
Could you elaborate on your experience? I’ve heard a lot about how well google
got into schools with gdocs and chrome books but I’ve never heard much more.

------
manigandham
> _...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._

This sums it up, and is the core problem with GCP.

Unfortunately the replacement CEO is the person who ran Oracle Cloud, which is
far worse currently than GCP. The future does not look bright.

------
joejerryronnie
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.

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.

~~~
jakegarelick
I keep hearing that Google seems to be lacking in the enterprise sales area,
but from what I’ve heard, G Suite seems to be doing quite well. What explains
that?

~~~
joejerryronnie
G Suite basically sells itself and doesn’t really require an enterprise sales
force in the traditional sense. This works because G Suite is implemented from
the bottom up, i.e. individuals and workgroups begin using G Suite and then
pressure management to adopt it department/company wide.

This is very different from large scale enterprise software or infrastructure
sales (cloud in this case) where you need to respond to RFPs, establish a
relationship with the C suite, run POCs tailored to the customer’s particular
use cases, present a compelling product roadmap, convince the customer that
you’re in it for the long term partnership, etc. These are not things Google
currently excels at.

------
the_duke
To be succeeded by Thomas Kurian, president of product development at
Oracle... (for 12 years!)

Now I know nothing about the man, and Google definitely needs to learn how to
deal with enterprise customers.

But this doesn't exactly fill me with hope.

~~~
vasac
Here’s testimony from Cameron Purdy, he used to work for Kurian at Oracle -
[https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-
at-O...](https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-Oracle-He-
is-the-new-CEO-of-Google-Cloud-What-is-he-like)

~~~
gaius
_Some people speak quietly, and use words that do not convey exactly what they
are feeling. TK is very good at speaking at an amply audible level and using
very efficient words (often no more than 4 letters long)_

------
pier25
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.

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.

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.

Some concrete examples to expand on the previous points:

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.

I want GraphQL services like AWS AppSync, Prisma, or Hasura. Google has zero
GraphQL services (AFAIK).

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.

------
erikb
Wondering why again SAP isn't even mentioned...

------
throwaway487548
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.

Making analogues of J2EE Application Servers for native code is the wrong way.
It is against intelligence.

~~~
pjmlp
It is the return of the mainframe and time-sharing, just with prettier
interfaces.

Enterprise loves them.

As for Plan 9, the end of the road was Inferno and Limbo actually. Plan 9 was
the stepping stone.

