
Google’s Cloud Loses Following Among CIOs, Survey Finds - softdev12
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/06/googles-cloud-loses-following-among-cios-survey-finds/
======
jread
Some quantitative data - we monitor Alexa and Fortune 500 marketshare for
cloud services. This article is mostly accurate - Google has not taken much
marketshare according to our stats. Currently, EC2 is 13% for Alexa 1k/10k and
11% Fortune 500. Rackspace is 5.5% Alexa 1k/10k and 19.4% Fortune 500. Google
is under 1% for both, while Azure is between 1-2%. Our stats are available
here:

[http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/12/compute-marketshare-
ale...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/12/compute-marketshare-alexa-
fortune-500.html)

[https://cloudharmony.com/cloudsquare#compare-aws:ec2-and-
goo...](https://cloudharmony.com/cloudsquare#compare-aws:ec2-and-
google:compute-and-rackspace:servers)

Edit: added blog link

~~~
ripberge
19.4% of Fortune 500 using Rackspace's cloud product sounds very high. How do
you differentiate normal Rackspace customers from those using their cloud
offering? I would assume they're all in the same data centers.

~~~
jread
We aren't able to differentiate - Rackspace stats include both cloud and
dedicated.

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brucehart
I think Google's history of shutting down products would keep me from picking
Google Cloud for a major project. If Google Cloud continues to lag behind the
market, you have to think they will shut it down like Google Reader, Google
Wave and a number of other products. Even if Amazon isn't perfect, I feel like
AWS will be around for a long time.

~~~
riffraff
I _think_ people were also annoyed by the GAE pricing change mess.

Also, amazon is known for good support, google is known for horrible support.

~~~
JOnAgain
Amazon might be known for good support on the customer business, but I've not
heard the same regarding AWS -- quite the opposite. If Google support were
worse, it would have to just ignore you.

~~~
curun1r
It think it varies based on your account. We were one of the companies that
presented during the keynote at this year's re:Invent. We've also got an
enterprise account. I'm not sure if either of these are a determining factor,
but we get excellent support. Phone support is good and emails are answered in
about an hour. They've also connected us with their engineers when support
isn't able to resolve things.

On the whole, I think the only thing they could improve would be to reduce the
siloing between different offerings. When dealing with an issue that spans,
say, EC2 and Route 53, I would expect their support to talk to each other and
present a unified response to the customer rather than require us to deal with
two separate support reps. But this type of siloing goes beyond support and
applies equally to the AWS product.

~~~
b1twise
Yes the fact that you were inside the loop enough to be part of the
presentation side of re:Invent means your experience is abnormal. You've got
the right contacts and profile for them to brag about you.

Having said that, we pay for their 500$/mo support offering and the responses
are pretty good. We're also split between AZ's etc as recommended.

------
mrj
Good. Compute engine is crazy fast because all of the hardware isn't over
allocated. Go ahead and use Amazon, I hear good things. :-)

~~~
vlikmn
AWS performance seems better: [http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/07/comparing-
cloud-compute...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/07/comparing-cloud-
compute-services.html)

~~~
judkowitz
Cloud Harmony has done some more testing since then which covers some more
configurations and you will see Google does quite well - especially if you
normalize by price (not in the charts, but prices are public)

[https://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks/compute/storage#4k_Rand_...](https://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks/compute/storage#4k_Rand_IOPS)

[https://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks/compute/terasort](https://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks/compute/terasort)

------
AndyNemmity
I work with CIOs of major companies often. The biggest driver here from what I
see is that people are more familiar with AWS. All along the chain of decision
making, people have experience with AWS, and can validate it for use.

Not so for other cloud services. It becomes inevitable when every decision
maker in your chain can validate one product, and has no experience with
others.

~~~
Someone1234
That rings true for me. AWS has a huge amount of momentum behind it because
people are already familiar with the product, thanks in part to its market
position, but also due to the 12 months free trial that a lot of people
[ab]use in their own time.

I will say Microsoft has been doing a lot to familiarise people with Azure,
they've been giving it away to students and MSDN subscriptions like candy as
well as offering trials in various shapes and sizes.

I dread to think how much Microsoft spends on Azure advertising, but
considering there is now an NFL ad for it, likely a heck of a lot.

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geobmx540
It probably helps that AWS has some big and vocal clients. NFLX has probably
helped AWS drive innovation and new tooling by providing use cases that most
other platforms likely don't have. It also helps that NFLX is crazy vocal on
the technical side about how they use AWS to it's fullest capabilities and how
they build around "limitations". Makes others feel comfortable that the stack
should be able to work for anyone.

I'm an Azure client and prefer azure personally.

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rifung
While the article was informative, it'd be a lot more interesting if it went
into the reason people prefer AWS. Does anyone care to comment why they or
their company decided to use AWS over competing products?

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dantiberian
The question was asked to CIO's to "name their preferred public cloud
provider". It's not clear to me what preferred means here. I'd bet a large
number of them still have a large amount of on-premise. Does preferred mean
the vendor with the highest compute workload, or the one they would pick _if_
they were to move to the cloud?

I have to think that it would be the latter, because moving that much compute
workload off of Google's Cloud between 2014 and 2015 would be a big effort.

------
zzzeek
> “We attribute the Google losses to AWS winning the initial branding war over
> Google Cloud,” he said in an email. “Specifically the initial market share
> lead triggers future market share gains.”

what a depressingly ignorant and dismissive explanation! How about technical
merit, no? All of us preferring to run real OSes rather than some awkward
proprietary sandbox, it's all just our falling for "branding" huh?

~~~
dragonwriter
> All of us preferring to run real OSes rather than some awkward proprietary
> sandbox, it's all just our falling for "branding" huh?

The first part of your sentence sounds like you are confusing the whole of
Google Cloud -- which includes an IaaS that runs "real OS's" (Google Compute
Engine) -- with one of the older components of Google Cloud, the PaaS
(AppEngine) that might reasonably be described as something like a
"proprietary sandbox".

So, it seems like exactly the effect that was described with regard to
perception and branding.

~~~
seanp2k2
I would guess that this confusion is pretty common, too. Maybe it was a
mistake to launch GAE before Compute. It'd be like AWS starting with Lambda
for a few years, messing with pricing, then somewhat quietly launching a
general-purpose compute PaaS.

Also, AWS has dozens of services. Does Google have the same building blocks?
(Storage, caching, CDN, databases, load balancing, etc)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Also, AWS has dozens of services.

As does Google Cloud

> Does Google have the same building blocks?

Not identical -- GCE has less separate products than AWSthe ones that are
under the Google Cloud Services are listed on the Google Cloud homepage:
[https://cloud.google.com](https://cloud.google.com)

------
hangonhn
Is that chart suppose to say "VMware"? Squinting at it, it looks like
"Wmware". Anyone have a link to an easier to read version?

~~~
bengali3
nice wsj. I think its showing 'WMvare'

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b1twise
I moved my company over to AWS before all the other options popped up. I did
have a few back and forth conversations with someone from GCE late last year,
but the end of the year is not really a great time to start a move like that.
We are forced to use some other Google products and the lack of support,
number of new "features" that aren't thought through, and their lack of
ability to give answers to BASIC and SIMPLE question drives me crazy.
Sometimes it feels like they're out to specifically screw us. We've cut our
adwords budget significantly. The only nagging thing that tugs at my brain is
that maybe we'd be considered a 'fast' internet site and get better search
engine ranking if we were on GCE. That might make it worth it.

------
mathattack
The dominance of Amazon continues to amaze me. I thought that Google would win
since this is a technology fight. In 20/20 hindsight, it's a price war, and
that's in the DNA of Amazon.

~~~
chubot
Well, Amazon also has a 6 year head start. Compute Engine has only been
generally available since December 2013:
[http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/google-
com...](http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/google-compute-
engine-is-now-generally-available.html)

App Engine was released a long time ago, around the same time as AWS, but they
aren't comparable products. It seems clear that the market chose the AWS
technology since it was more compatible with existing code.

~~~
dragonwriter
> App Engine was released a long time ago, around the same time as AWS

Two years later, actually.

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wnevets
I'm a bit of a Google fanboy however at work I haven't seriously considered
moving to their cloud offering.

------
hadley
prop.test(c(13, 8), c(152, 152)):

2-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction

data: c(13, 8) out of c(152, 152)

X-squared = 0.8184, df = 1, p-value = 0.3656

alternative hypothesis: two.sided

95 percent confidence interval: -0.03057673 0.09636621

So there's no evidence that there actually was a statistically significant
change in usage of google's cloud.

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bpodgursky
As they say... nobody ever got fired for buying AWS.

