
Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle - deanmoriarty
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/google-and-ibm-still-trying-desperately-to-move-cloud-market-share-needle/
======
spricket
The reason for IBM's failure is pretty obvious. Their old school bare-metal
servers at Softlayer are a good value, but the need for bare metal is
decreasing with IO improvements like SR-IOV and real hardware level
virtualization (ex HVM on AWS). I've also heard IBM is running that division
into the ground.

Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure
out how much my server would cost. They're too used to old school contracts
when I can easily setup a server with many providers in 5 min with $5 for a
month. IBM has never been a commodity business, but nearly everything they
sell is becoming a commodity.

GCP's problem, as far as I can tell, is too much "cute" shitty documentation.
And their hatred for maintaining services on a reasonable timescale. Everyone
I know, even outside of tech, has lost a Google service they loved over the
years to neglect. See Golang package management for a notorious example in the
devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf?

It seems to be common knowledge that Google's infrastructure is technically
the most solid of any cloud provider. That's just not enough when you need
something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade.
That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical
businesses

~~~
politelemon
Completely anecdotally speaking - at a few enterprises, convincing customers
to make use of GCP has been an uphill battle. I notice deep misgivings
regarding the support timescales, and even for supported products, poor
support in general (ymmv+++).

GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in
the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped
assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support.

> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can
> build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how
> software projects are done for non-technical businesses

Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and
after some experience this resonates quite well.

~~~
spricket
Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-
technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years
ago, before they cloned most of AWS).

Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any
business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it.

We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far
some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an
usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another
decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good
reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about
50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up
to keep it limping along.

1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that
builds software to migrate.

~~~
killjoywashere
> Windows 95 in a VM

Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw
it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be
replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant
grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding
edge, boys, bleeding edge.

~~~
fsloth
Statistically a new software project - especially if done by a team with no
common history of past successes - is risky.

So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they
select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the
product from scratch.

------
sandGorgon
Google has two big problems - developer relations and compliances.

Here's a very simple example - has anyone filed a ticket in Google cloud ?
Well you cant, unless you are on an expensive tier of support. Even when you
have one, it is super hard to file a ticket. They generally ask you to go to
Google groups.

AWS and Azure ticket support is beyond awesome. Anything from issues with
servers to billing. AWS has live chat support for 29$ per month. In India, the
only way to get postpaid billing is through a local Google partner : Google
will not do it. On AWS and Azure, it's a simple process after you hit a
certain spend .

AWS Artifact is a brilliant self service tool for compliance. And I can't
stress this enough - they do this country by country. They will issue
digitally signed (for you) compliance documents for free. In fact, in India
they went above and beyond and did specific compliance (using a big-4
consultancy) because of some regulatory changes that I highlighted.

I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud
service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service. Their
entire sales org is broken.

~~~
ernsheong
You can go to [https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-
trackers](https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers) and open a
ticket at the respective product public issue tracker without a paid support
plan.

~~~
sandGorgon
These are issue trackers. I'm not reporting a bug in Google. I want support on
"how to do X" or "I purchased this reserved instance by accident, can I get a
refund".

~~~
ernsheong
Fair enough. For questions, Stack Overflow is what they usually point to.
Sometimes GCP staff logs on and answers, otherwise the community.

For the refund scenario, I found this:
[https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-
issues](https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues)

You can also vent in their feedback widget within Console. To my surprise the
product managers actually read it, and sometimes respond back for more
information.

There's also a UserVoice forum to voice out feature requests for each product:
[https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-goog...](https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-google-
cloud-platform)

~~~
sandGorgon
I also recently found out there is slack channel ! But look, this is not what
people want. We are looking for a plain, vanilla, ticketing system that
someone can respond to. GCloud does have it at the Gold level support.

So in my mind, GCloud is more figure-it-yourself-dont-call-us . AWS is more
dependable. They have scaled their sales/devrel/support ops so that a small
startup can access it.

Google only does this for the Snapchats of the world.

~~~
morgante
> We are looking for a plain, vanilla, ticketing system that someone can
> respond to.

You definitely don't have to be Snapchat-sized to get access to the support
console where you open tickets. The base plan is $100/m, which is admittedly
more expensive than Amazon's $29/m but should give exactly what you're looking
for.

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.

[0] [https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-
options](https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-options)

~~~
sandGorgon
ahh - it has actually gone down. About 6 months back, it was 150-200$ per
month and before that it was always a percentage of spend. I just saw that the
old gold/silver/platinum have gone away and replaced with role-based support
options.

Thanks for highlighting that!

------
airstrike
> Neither company is satisfied with that, of course. Google so much so that it
> moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle
> veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums.

> (...)

> Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of
> salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page
> straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.

I'm not an Enterprise IT expert, but looking from the outside, it doesn't seem
like AWS and Azure got to where they are today by following that playbook...

My personal take on it is that AWS was first-to-market with a 21st Century-
ready cloud offering (i.e. you could pretty much hear developers shouting
"Yes, _THIS_ is what I'm talking about. Finally!") and Azure got to where it
is by responding quickly and aggressively, with an additional pull for certain
customers due to the synergy with MS / Windows, as well as being the next best
choice for those directly competing with or not willing to sign up to Amazon.

If that's true, then unless Google / IBM can really differentiate themselves,
they will always lag far behind. I don't know what other plans they have in
store, but opening up Watson to other platforms or hiring an Oracle sales guy
are not quite what I'd call differentiators.

~~~
richardw
Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable
the massive .net/MS-SQL army. Initial attempts weren't great (Azure tables,
branding changes) but they iterated fast and knocked it out the park.

Google is replicating Amazon now (after failing with app engine), but without
the mindshare. Amazing because they are _the_ cloud story - many cheap
computers rather than huge ones. App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell
of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook.

Right now, nobody gets fired for using Amazon.

~~~
emilsedgh
> Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable
> the massive .net/MS-SQL army.

I'd be interested to know about the number of:

* Linux based deployments on Azure * Windows/.Net based deployments on other providers

Basically I'm assuming that all the .NET crowd is hosted at Azure and the rest
are being hosted on Amazon/Google/RedHat/Heroku.

If that assumption is true (even with 4-5% of room for error) the ~20% would
be .NET's share on the backend.

Am I missing something obvious?

~~~
dsl
Azure is bought in the boardroom, not by the engineers and ops staff that will
use it on a day to day basis.

When you have a $xx million Azure minimum commit that your C-level has already
written a check for, you yell at your account team until they add Linux
support and try to make due with what you have.

I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that
they see long term value in doing a "lift and shift" of existing apps, then
down the road sell them consulting services to migrate to .net.

~~~
sempron64
Actually Azure has a huge hook at the engineering level in that Visual Studio
Enterprise subscriptions come with $150 a month in Azure credit. It's very
hard to avoid using when you just need to slap a quick demo online and need a
server or DB and your in-house IT is away, it's all right there in the IDE...
and then you're in hook, line, and sinker. So while there are C-suite level
mega-sales, Azure has plenty of grassroots appeal.

~~~
munchbunny
That's actually a great point, Visual Studio becomes a distribution point for
Azure client software and SDK's, meaning you potentially don't have to do any
extra configuration the way AWS and GCP require.

------
Brahma111
I am not surprised for IBM but Google could do a heck of a better job if they
treated their customers a bit better. They suddenly make changes to their
policies and don't care a bit while discontinuing services who don't update
their products. I had two very bad experience with Google. The first was when
Firebase was still a niche and we built our product on top of it. Then they
made an update where certain features were deprecated in the tier that we were
in. One fine day the product stopped working.

The second was a more recent one where our app was discontinued from their
playstore because they updated their SMS policies. All their communication
were landing to my Bulk folder. Even HN has some horror stories about their
'couldn't care less' attitude.

~~~
avip
Let me guess: "the tier that we were in" was the free tier?

~~~
jussij
And it may well be that "the tier that we were in" was the free tier.

But my question would be why did Google enter a paying field with a free
option, knowing full well it would kill off all those paying players, to only
then kill their free option knowing all competition is now gone?

Google should not be offering up any service, free or otherwise that has a
_use by date_ that is only known to Google.

------
keerthiko
I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more
aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at
varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high
end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their
money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that
familiar with cloud tools that are _significantly_ easier to use than AWS.

It's a boon for startups that are being quick and scrappy and haven't brought
on a cloud specialist but need to use the cloud to run things regularly.

But where are the 1 year's worth of free credits ads? Or the regular meetups
to hand out cloud credits and give a tech talk and promote some startup? I'm
not even talking about basic customer service and support, something Google is
notoriously skimpy on (although probably mandatory to build developer
relations). This stuff is key. If they captured a unicorn or so, and churned
out the occasional semi-corn technical founder who advocates for a gcloud
stack out of SV when they move to their next gig, they will have grow their
market so much better.

It's mindboggling to me that with their resources and being based in MTV, and
being the single largest corporate alma mater of SV technical founders, more
startups here aren't being marketed to use gcloud.

~~~
bad_user
Google has lost much of the trust developers placed in them, first of all by
terminating products some of us loved [1] and also by terminating user
accounts in an automated fashion with no way to appeal.

Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your
account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly
broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decision or to
even find out what the hell happened [2].

I mean, imagine that your spouse buys a Nexus phone, sells it [3] and your
account gets banned via association, along with your right to publish apps or
content on Play or to access your email archive.

And if you think this can't happen with a GSuite account, since that's
supposedly the gold standard for their support, how about getting your entire
company of 100-150 people banned [4]?

So the answer for me at least is that I have a trust issue with Google. No
thanks, AWS has been around for longer, I haven't heard so many horror stories
from them and if I'm feeling adventurous one day, I might try Microsoft's
Azure, since they have actual support and without the history of shutting down
products over night.

[1] [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

[2] [https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-
start-u...](https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-up-
google-play-publisher-account-on-christmas-day-5cb69a454da0)

[3] [https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-
wi...](https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-with-the-
google/)

[4]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_getting_google_to_ban_our_entire_company/)

~~~
rincebrain
FWIW, [4] appears to be at least unverifiable, since OP never posted again,
and when support tried to reach out or find something that matched the listed
details, they never heard back and couldn't find something that fit? [1]

(Not trying to claim that there's not a problem, just that the particular
story seems to have a number of things that are suspect without further
details.)

(I work for elgooG, not on anything Cloud or otherwise related to this, this
is just my own $0.02, etc.)

[1] -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banne...](https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banned_an_entire_company_gsuite_accounts/dzcw5vg/)

~~~
eikenberry
The fact that it was a single, unconfirmed post and yet people still believe
it may say more about the trust issue than whether it really happened or not.

------
jacques_chester
Desperate? I'm not sure.

The total addressable market here is every non-local computational need.

That's trillions of dollars. For a market that is emerging right now, which
already shows massive path dependency. So there's one time to win a slice. It
can't be done later.

If I was Google's position, I wouldn't be running a profit. I'd be throwing
every spare copper into Cloud to grab market share. I'd be giving away credits
on street corners. Driving out at least IBM and Oracle by just drowning the
market with data centre capacity. Buying my way into existing relationships.
Finding folks in consumer-facing divisions who've trashed the brand ("how long
until this service is canceled, ha ha ha") and pulling them up sharply. Doing
whatever can be done.

I don't think Google really _gets_ , at the highest levels, that this is the
first business they have that can truly diversify them out of advertising.
They seem to see it as a nice extra source of cash, rather than an existential
imperative.

But then, Google hasn't got the DNA to be afraid of existential threats. It's
just not something they've dealt with since they switched on the cash pumps.
Meanwhile, everyone else in this fight _gets it_.

~~~
manigandham
Yes, it's been posited right here on HN years ago that GCP could dwarf their
existing ad business and that gets clearer by the day. However the vision and
momentum just doesn't match the opportunity.

It's especially strange that Amazon is now getting in the advertising business
and is very quickly (in less than 2 years) posing a serious threat to some of
Google's ad products.

------
pm90
What this articles doesn't mention that much is that IBM and Google are both
betting on catching the wave of containerization by following a somewhat
similar strategy.

They're both focusing on a container-native, Kubernetes oriented and
opinionated cloud. They're both heavily investing in Kubernetes development,
AI integrated technologies and the results are visible in the quality of their
container offering. Despite their reputation for obtuseness and lack of
support, as an enterprise customer, we've had fantastic support, quick
turnaround on issues and the actions taken on many of our feature requests.

As a developer, I've found GCP to be somewhat behind in features BUT man their
documentation is good, and easy to use. Despite this article, I would bet big
on Google Cloud. They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best
people. Maybe its due to Google Research? But I don't see them going anywhere
soon and in fact, I do see them as the next iteration of AI-heavy, big data
optimized and container native cloud (sorry, couldn't resist using all of the
buzzwords).

~~~
oblio
> They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people.

There's been plenty of projects filled with very smart people that have
failed.

~~~
pm90
I think my comment mentioned a lot of reasons why they might succeed and not
just because they're staffed with smart people. Cherry-picking a statement
like this really adds no value to the discussion.

------
mark-r
Google has always seemed actively hostile when it comes to support, since they
don't like to leave any power in the hands of a human when an algorithm could
do it more efficiently. Is cloud any different?

~~~
ernsheong
You can go to [https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-
trackers](https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers) and open a
ticket at the respective product issue tracker.

To get more hand-holding support, it's the same as AWS, i.e. you pay for it:
[https://cloud.google.com/support/](https://cloud.google.com/support/)

~~~
rexarex
Hostile answer further discredits google support

~~~
ernsheong
How is this answer hostile?

------
ringaroll
Who even would use Google Cloud seriously? They have a shitty history of
maintaining products after depreciation. No, 1 year is not enough. Once I've
invested in your platform, minimum of 5-7 years guarantee is mandatory.

Too many horror stories to even think about moving there.

This is coming from an org which spends 10M/Yr on Azure/AWS.

------
Analemma_
Cloud is where Google's reputation for killing products is really going to
haunt it. Every time HN commenters complain about Google axing a service,
there are lots of "you're making too big a deal about this, no one is leaving
Google because they ditched Reader" responses, and for its consumer products
that may be true.

But decisions about which cloud provider to use are made by C-suite
executives, and they absolutely do look warily at Google, especially in
comparison with Amazon (which makes basically all its profit from AWS) and
Microsoft (which is obsessed with back-compat and keeping old products working
as long as possible). Basic risk management and the huge cost of abruptly
switching clouds will be the albatross around GCE's neck.

~~~
keypusher
At startups and even medium sized tech companies, these decisions are often
driven by engineering/ops teams and not by executives. I was on a team trying
to decide between staying with AWS and moving to GCP about a year ago, at a
company that spends well over $1M/year on infrastructure. The fact that Google
has a track record of abandoning products with active users and has repeatedly
shown they do not know how to deal with customers was absolutely part of the
reason we decided to stay with AWS. I respect the engineering at Google
immensely, and I would be willing to reconsider in a few years, but they need
to prove their commitment first. They literally just killed another product
today (Android Things)!

~~~
ernsheong
Looks like GCP needs to sorely address this (mis)perception, and ensure their
commitments to GCP is separate from the consumer business.

But really, GCP is not the same as the consumer-facing products. GCP already
has a lot of clout, and literally nothing I know in GCP has been
deprecated/chopped just like that. GCP already has a huge following in its own
right and it's very unlikely for GCP stuff to be axed, given how careful they
are with implementing new features (I have interacted with numerous engineers,
and often feature requests are taken with a lot of valid pushback to prevent
feature creep).

~~~
raxxorrax
I don't think you can fully separate business and customers. Google Maps?
Google suddenly vastly increased prices.

This is something all cloud providers suffer from. What assurance do I get
that pricing and quality of service remains stable? Amazon has the same
problem. If I look into my billing console, I see an increase of used
computing resources. From inactive projects. They still managed to use
significant CPU-time. I would not be able to claim otherwise. As long as the
costs remain low, this is not a problem. But you have to believe your cloud
provider...

------
vfc1
Google is betting on serverless, with products that are very developer
friendly.

Firebase and the Firestore NoSQL database just out of beta are awesome
products, and they are backed by Google Cloud. The ability to build a
serverless application out with nearly no server code, with authentication,
file upload and hosting built-in is awesome.

Plus we can have Node processes for any server code that we might absolutely
need, like for signing Stripe payments.

~~~
discordance
If all you're doing is building web apps then that sounds pretty good.

Pretty certain any large enterprise cloud workload that gcp/azure/AWS is
interested in is a lot more than that. Data warehousing, Kafka stuff, identity
management, document storage etc

------
carlsborg
Its incredibly hard to catch up. The following is a list of new major AWS
functionality delivered just in the month of January:

[https://blog.clusterdyne.com/posts/new_aws_features_jan2019....](https://blog.clusterdyne.com/posts/new_aws_features_jan2019.html)

Two new services introduced and one in GA, plus multiple solid innovations
like the Elastic Inference Predictors API. And this doesn't include roll-outs
of existing services in new regions.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The amount of movement to Azure is staggering from AWS (if only from job
postings and recruiters I speak to). There are a lot of businesses that do not
want to fund their competitor (rightfully so), even if Azure is half baked (it
is, but one desperately hopes it gets better if one is forced to use it).

Also, Office 365, Exchange, AD, Sharepoint/OneDrive, Flow, and other platform
lock-ins are not to be discounted.

~~~
solotronics
is there any cloud thats "fully baked" in comparison to AWS?

~~~
partiallypro
No cloud provider is fully baked, that included AWS. Every single one of them
has their own set of drawbacks.

------
duxup
A friend of mine at an old company who relied heavily on IBM (and paid for it)
told me the story about how they were going to "get into the cloud stuff".
They talked to their IBM consultant guy at a meeting about what they wanted to
do and he told them what they were thinking of doing and he responded "well
that will take a few weeks, they have to set it up".

Now it was possible their IBM contact was thinking of some sort of older
managed hosting but he said they were talking about "cloud" for the entire
meeting ... at that point it seemed IBM just thought of managed hosting as
"cloud".

------
zmmmmm
There doesn't seem to be much information in the article. No actual numbers
just:

> the market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get
> a much bigger piece of the pie

In my circles people only talk about AWS and Google Cloud. I know there is
going to be a massive segment of the market that just defaults into Azure
because Microsoft .... but it seems to me that beyond that the race is pretty
much over. IBM, Oracle all the others are not going to succeed beyond niche
applications.

~~~
sanxiyn
In my circles a lot of non-Microsoft people talk about Azure.

~~~
kerng
Yeah, same here. Microsoft seems to really change people's minds these days.
Many of my friends disliked them, but now see them as a great option compared
to AWS lock in. I think Azure has a strong offering, but that Portal UI, oh
my...

~~~
discordance
Yeah the portal UI sucks. Anyone seriously using Azure is probably using az-
cli, ARM templates, terraform etc.

------
killjoywashere
One thing Google doesn't get is how big a deal it was to reject the DoD. Vast
swaths of corporate America do business with the DoD. And a lot of people in
DoD took the Prohect Maven backlash a bit personally. The general tenor of the
conversations I have about GCp with these folks isn't "No, just flat no". It's
"NO! Oh, hellll no!" The fact that they refuse to bump their FedRamp cert to
cover DoD req'ts doesn't help.

I seriously doubt a company with any significant fraction of income tied to
DoD is going to ever allow it to appear that they might have ever even
considered GCP.

~~~
b_tterc_p
It seems very unlikely to me that google is not aware of this

------
chiph
Ginni Rometty was on Bloomberg the other day saying that Hybrid Clouds are a
trillion dollar business and that IBM intends to be #1 in the market.

[https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-
hybrid...](https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-
hybrid-171405544.html)

I'm more than a little skeptical on their ability to execute on this, given
that they've let a lot of their top-talent go.

------
PaulHoule
Oracle's cloud efforts are just a footnote even when compared to the "IBM
Cloud". If Google thinks hiring somebody from Oracle is going to solve their
problems, they are delusional.

They'd be better off picking somebody at random from one of the flyover states
then sticking to the monoculture.

------
latch
Am I the only one that thinks IBM's acquisition of Softlayer did more to help
Amazon than it did to help IBM? (or, more specifically, their mishandling of
the acquisition)

Cloud isn't the big market, traditional hosting is. But cloud continues to
grow. I thought the idea behind the Softlayer acquisition was going to be to
try to funnel the much larger group of people who aren't ALL IN on cloud into
some hybrid/cloud option.

~~~
fierro
"cloud isn't the big market" sorry lost me there

~~~
dragandj
Not a native speaker, but it seems to me that they are not saying that cloud
is not _a_ big market, but that the cloud is not THE big market, since THE big
market is something else (bare metal?).

~~~
latch
That's exactly what I was saying. Thank you. I think I'd agree that it's the
fastest growing market. And maybe the one with the highest profit margins
though.

------
excalibur
Related, seemingly contradictory:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-
pitch...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch-vs-aws-
we-wont-compete-with-you.html)

~~~
partiallypro
This is one of the main reasons I am so highly confused why Netflix is so
melded with AWS. When Netflix more or less made itself 100% AWS a year or two
back, I was genuinely baffled.

~~~
dsl
> Netflix is so melded with AWS.

But it isn't.

Netflix core service (video streaming) runs entirely on hardware they produce
that runs in their own datacenters and embedded in ISPs. Billing, account
management, video transcoding, etc. happen in AWS, but all that stuff can go
down and customers don't get that upset.

~~~
T2_t2
Video transcoding is particularly suited to the cloud. This sort if
unpredictable load - new titles will pop up at odd intervals - is ideal for
striking the balance between speed to market (you don't want to delay
releasing new titles) and cost (having extra capacity for transcoding on the
off chance you need it is expensive).

Spool up hundreds of servers when they need to get a new title out, and buy
them at cheapish rates is pretty much what the cloud was built for.

------
stupidlogin
I think by going the "enterprise playbook" route, with an Oracle guy no less,
Google are ignoring the long tail at their own peril.

With the cloud market still relatively new, a lot of the adoption decisions,
especially in small and mid-sized companies, are not made at C-level, but
driven (directly and indirectly) bottom up from the technical teams.

And a major driver there is familiarity with the platform. And familiarity is
driven by how easy it is to quickly set something up and play around with to
see if it fits your needs. Even appeal for developers' private projects could
tip the scales here.

And while Google isn't so bad on the technical end of this, they certainly are
when it comes to signing up and to pricing. So, ultimately, AWS has a kind of
bottom-up push that G can't match and certainly won't by playing the
enterprise playbook.

Add to that their track record with killing services, and their generally less
than approachable support, and it's no wonder they're single-digit.

------
OhHeyItsE
Lots of commenters here failing to recognize how much competition within
consumer vertical plays here.

For years AWS _was_ the cloud, and the only viable option.

At the same time that traditionally non-technical (or at least not tech-first)
companies are coming around to the idea of moving to the cloud, there are
alternatives for the first time ever.

Amazon is now a major player in ecommerce, perishable/grocery _and_ digital
media content (both delivery and production). Companies in those verticals are
hesitant to move to AWS, some are already outright refusing. This is where the
opportunity for competitors lies.

Edit: was mentioned, about 13 hours before I did
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933)

------
sam_goody
The "S" In GCP stands for support.

As a former App Engine user, steer clear of Google cloud.

(And I am aware that Amazon also has what to improve in support.)

------
aboutruby
From a user point of view I much prefer AWS than Google Cloud (and I got used
to the AWS names). Also as AWS is what basically everyone used, all the
tooling is built mainly around it and sometimes support Google Cloud but it's
not very well tested / supported. All that steams basically from being the
leader by a vast margin.

~~~
ernsheong
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is much simpler from a developer standpoint. AWS
might have 20 tools to solve 20 problems, GCP has 5 tools to solve 20 problems
(that's my observation).

The tools provided by GCP itself will help you get the job done. AWS never
really clicked for me, terrible UI/UX, too many steps to get things done. GCP
is the opposite when it comes to ease of doing most things. When I started
using GCP, I had a "wow" and "aha" moment: this is how a cloud should be.

Give GCP a shot ;)

~~~
takeda
I played with both, and I think in terms of what's easier is probably which
one you used first, although I must admit that they are constantly adding new
services, so perhaps for people that are starting now might get confusing to
know which are the core services and which are just extra. They should
simplify their console to list just core stuff, and put the other stuff on
separate page.

They have their own strengths and weaknesses. What jumped out to me is when I
tried Google is I believe that Google has superior network infrastructure that
lets them do some things that are hard to do in AWS, especially seamless
integration of networking between regions, internal IPs also don't seem to be
tied to individual zones etc.

On the other hand, some services are just awful. I tried Deployment Manager,
and while looks like it is a nice design that makes it more powerful than
Cloud Formation, it is still buggy. Seeing that I'm now not surprised that
terraform is so popular. I don't think it is that much better compared to CF,
but if you use DM you must be a masochist.

------
kerng
I'm not sure if hiring an Oracle person will change much here. GCP lacks with
features and is so focused on Kubernetes alone. Biggest issue with Google is
support and lack of diverse options. I have never used IBM, so can't comment
on their experience - but IBM always had good sales and consulting teams.

Maybe both should team up?

------
shereadsthenews
Alternative interpretation: Google's Cloud is ridiculously large, but they
occupy 99% of it with their own product.

------
true_tuna
Hey google. You want people to use your cloud? Fix your documentation. It’s
abysmal. For example: 1) How do you use let’s encrypt with google kubernetes
engine? 2) How do you securely store secrets? Pretend you don’t know and try
to follow the documentation to figure it out. You can’t because the
documentation isn’t geared towards solving specific problems. I have no idea
what it IS geared towards, but it’s not that. You will never win if people
can’t figure out how to do the things they need to do. Aws is arguably more
expensive and in some ways less capable. But they will win simply because
normal people can figure out how to do stuff.

------
mark_l_watson
I have never been a fan of IBM but if you like open stack for dev ops then
their BlueBiz service is nice, with a very generous free tier.

I have always favored GCP over AWS but Amazon does win in the customer support
offered.

It will be interesting to see if Google invests in non-automated human teams
for sales and support.

~~~
chaoticmass
BueBiz? Do you mean Blue Mix?

~~~
mark_l_watson
Yes, thanks

------
mathattack
They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google’s Customer
perception problem is that it’s too hard to use. (Fear of the unknown) IBM’s
is that people resent their history of broken promises and hype. (Fear of the
known)

~~~
ardy42
> They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google’s
> Customer perception problem is that it’s too hard to use. (Fear of the
> unknown) IBM’s is that people resent their history of broken promises and
> hype. (Fear of the known)

Google has its share of broken promises around sudden product discontinuation,
and account closures without recourse.

~~~
mathattack
Fair enough. And that spoons businesses. I think the larger perception on them
is that the technology generally works, it’s the handholding that’s missing.

------
businessaddress
IBM's Softlayer offers various Cloud options as well. I don't know how do they
fare against other major Clouds however. I don't know about Google Cloud
services, but AWS use a very unethical business model which lacks
transparency. Most of their clients aren't warned that they will end up paying
a high data transfer fees on "Data Transfer Out".

Our experience with Azure is a bit better, but they are still more expensive
than any average cloud. Our company uses cloud infrastructure service with a
smaller cloud - [https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public-
cloud.html](https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public-cloud.html) \- and they are
pretty good and inexpensive, compared to the major clouds, in terms of
technology (VMware Cloud computing) and in terms of cloud storage.

------
ummonk
Wait. AWS only has 32% market share? That is way less than I would have
guessed.

~~~
cobookman
32% of `cloud` marketshare. Cloud includes things like Salesforce's SaaS,
Oracle DB in the cloud, Office 365, gSuite, ...etc.

I'm sure if you look at Compute, Storage, and Networking cloud spend, AWS has
a much higher marketshare.

~~~
ummonk
Okay yeah, that makes sense.

------
crb002
IBM needs mainframes collocated with cloud data centers if it wants to stay
relevant. CA is legit in the CAP model, but you need sane latency to other
systems.

------
chid
what about Oracle/Alibaba clouds?

~~~
jhwang5
Fun fact: Aliyun (Alibaba cloud) has more revenue than GCP

~~~
skc
So I just took a look at their offering and was shocked to see just how many
services they offer. Way more than I had anticipated for a provider I don't
really hear too much about.

------
parker55
why they are not capable enough to move for that?

------
hacknat
Google is the only (major) cloud provider to suffer global service outages
(AWS and Azure have only ever had region-wide outages). They have done so more
than once, and they have no notable blog posts that ever explain how they will
mitigate it in the future. That's enough from my perspective to never
recommend them to any customer that ever needs region redundancy.

From my experience of being a cloud middle man the only industries left that
haven't already migrated to the cloud are the ones that have burdensome
regulatory and compliance burdens. From that perspective MSFT is winning. They
try the hardest to get all the qualifications, certs, and partners that make
Medicine, Finance, and Auto feel safe. Are they the best cloud? Probably not,
but they are poised to take what's left of those who haven't ventured into the
cloud yet.

~~~
kubabuba
What global outage do you mean ? I havent seen one for 1y of using it
meanwhile office 365 just scored a global outage recently

