
Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud - devhwrng
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud?pu=hackernewsyw3xln&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock
======
altgoogler
Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this
topic.

I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that
Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023.

> said people with knowledge of the matter.

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.

> 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.

So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.

In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an
executive level ever.

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. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing
FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get
discussed at an executive level.

And finally:

> A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this
> story, but after it appeared released the following statement: "Reports of
> these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate."

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.

~~~
ogre_codes
> So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.

The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact
that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There
have been 3 stories on HN _in the past couple weeks alone_ about Google
products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that
they are no longer viable for developers to use.

Google has lost a lot of trust in the community and if Google management wants
to avoid this kind of reaction, they need to build a reputation for stability.
Years of dropping products people rely has eroded much of the good will people
used to have for Google.

Amazon doesn't drop products. Microsoft has spent decades building a
reputation for having a long term reliable product road-map.

Google is fickle and doesn't seem to care when they screw people over by
changing terms underneath us. As the old saying goes—fool me once, shame on
you; fool me twice, shame on me.

~~~
ximeng
Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to
billing for cloud services:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835)

Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.

~~~
dragonsh
Poor customer service is not exclusive to Amazon, google directly shut the
product down which cannot earn search scale revenue. If you see comments below
being downvoted by google PR for examples.

I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft
deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments
which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I
commented on Amazon. Now can see here when it’s critical of google.

~~~
1MoreThing
This is the same logic my extended family uses when they tell me that their
phones eavesdrop on their conversations to target advertisements. Just because
it's possible and fits your narrative doesn't make it true.

No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and
then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a
niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this?

~~~
jacquesm
> No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and
> then manually downvote this kind of thing

Astroturfing and reputation management are a thing. Also, big companies have a
large number of employees some of who hang out here and will simply take
offense by association, which could be more than enough to explain the effect
even if the company itself has nothing to do with it.

HN is no longer niche.

> Who has the budget for this?

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and whole pile more if
they wanted to it would be a round off error on their budget but besides one
of those I don't think there was ever hard evidence that this happens.

Reputation management is becoming more and more important to brands.

------
mrosett
I can't imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that's
already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when
they'll abandon cloud. How could anyone in their right mind start building on
GCP? They may as well shut it down today.

~~~
throwawayhhakdl
Stadia would probably crumble alongside GCP by necessity too, right?

~~~
sylens
Stadia is a brute force attempt to grow GCP revenue

~~~
mikepurvis
The Stadia pro tier fee is just $9.99/mo. The GPU and CPU you could consume
playing a AAA game on that (yes, even on the purported "medium" settings) for
just a few hours a day surely far exceeds what it could be sold for wholesale.

~~~
teachrdan
Don't forget that they're selling the games, too--and some Stadia games are up
to $10 more (!) than their non-Stadia counterparts.

(Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)

~~~
echelon
> (Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia
> subscription.)

What. The. Fuck.

First, they took our physical games and media away. Then they made us
subscribe. Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our
subscriptions? I can't even conceive of what the next step will be -- will
they charge us for having memories of their IP?

We need to reduce copyright terms and kill this cancer of IP hoarding. The
rent-seekers are taking ownership away.

~~~
myko
> Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our subscriptions?

They take away the games you claimed as a Pro subscriber - similar to how PS+
works. If you claim a game on PS+ and quit PS+, you lose those games.

If you buy the game you can keep it and still play it even after you're done
subscribing.

------
antoncohen
I want to put on end to the "you can't contact Google" comments that comes up
every time Google Cloud makes the front page.

You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a
small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with
equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with
GCP, compared to AWS.

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).

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.

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 _Escalate_ 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't my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying
to improve the Level 1 support.

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.

~~~
choppaface
I’ve had a similar experience where I could email PMs and we even had Google
forward deployed engineers on-site.

The trouble is that their customer service is terrible.

We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug
in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I
gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to
prove the bug existed. The engineer even found more bugs while watching my
screen.

The sales engineers (solution consultants?) are rather slimey, especially
compared to the PMs who often admit when they don’t know something. This one
eng kept pushing Dataflow even after we said no 100 times. It appears Google
uses Dataflow / Beam internally now (instead of MapReduce) and so I guess at
Google you’re dumb if you’re not doing the “correct” thing.

Also frustrating was how much money we wasted due to things like multi-gpu
jobs taking 10-15 minutes to start and their GPU hypervisor pausing the whole
system for 10-20 seconds incessantly.

If you use GCE, make sure Google is paying for the bloody edges. Get a ton of
credits.

~~~
faizshah
Cloud Dataflow is also vastly more expensive than using pyspark and Apache
Beam is 10 times slower for most operations than Flink or Spark. I have to try
the new flexible scheduling but DataFlow the last time I tried it 2 years ago
was a massive rip off.

Also DataPrep was amazing until you run the DataFlow pipeline it produces and
a < 1TB dataset cleaning costs $25...

Have had good experiences once the data is in bigquery and bq keeps costs low.
But lately Ive been trying to figure out a semi-managed way of doing exactly-
once stream processing for cheaper than dataflow. Possibly an architecture
around cloud run might work.

~~~
ramraj07
$25 for cleaning a relatively small dataset does sound a bit high but not
outrageous.. given the process abstracts out all the infra tweaking and
setting up various systems. $25 an hour is probably a good estimate of how
much a data warehouse like snowflake costs for a reasonable cluster as well,
so unless you spin up your own spot ec2 instances and set up a spark cluster
and perform the operations the cost savings are going to be marginal at best?

Do you need to run this pipeline more than once a day? Is it sufficiently
important for your business case? I feel like 25 is a very small sum if any of
them are remotely true.

On a related note, how practically reliable is the DataPrep->DataFlow
workflow? Could a reasonably smart analyst with zero programming experience
set them up and run them? Feel like that's who this workflow is built for, but
I've not had the best of experiences with Trifacta demos in AWS with
reliability.

~~~
choppaface
In my experience $25 for 1TB of ETL is outrageously high. That’s 100 cores of
GCP or AWS for 4-5hrs. I have some very very CPU intensive jobs that would
take about that time for 300GB of data. But if it’s just parsing CSV / JSON
and doing some joins then I’d think $5/TB would be more reasonable.

I agree a warehouse could get more expensive, but that’s where Athena or
BigQuery is supposed to come in? BigQuery is rather expensive though. It can’t
support reading Parquet natively (of course Google insists on their own
format) so you have to pay their heavy tax versus just object storage and
elastic compute.

Also the classic BigQuery UI is way less buggy than the new one, and the PMs
won’t take bugs for the new UI.

------
echelon
Oh my god. How is Google so clueless to let this leak?

Now that we know they're not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023, what
reason does anyone in their right might have to use their services?

I was previously considering GCP. And now I'm not.

Great job, Google. You're so short-sighted you'll remain in adtech forever.
Not even your founders could keep interest.

This leak was a billion dollar mistake. And I'm grateful for it. It's saved me
a whole lot of headache.

~~~
rumanator
> Now that we know they're not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023

I have no clue how anyone could arrive at that interpretation. What exactly
let you to that conclusion?

~~~
echelon
From two sources.

1) The article.

> 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.

2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.

~~~
clSTophEjUdRanu
If it's profitable why do they care if it passes Amazon or Microsoft?

~~~
sdnlafkjh34rw
I'm fairly certain Google Cloud is not profitable. Even if it is profitable,
Google will divest from business that don't hit a certain scale (billion $
businesses). Basically their goal is to never have employees staffed on
projects which yield a low $ / employee ratio. They will invest for a while,
but pull the plug after some arbitrary time if it doesn't hit the scale.

~~~
izend
Exactly, which is the exact opposite of what AWS is doing. They have how many
services that very few people use now? But at least they respect their
customers and view the cost of running those services as goodwill for their
customers.

~~~
echelon
It's the opposite of what AWS is doing, but not what Amazon as a whole is
doing. There was a recent article that said they're considering cost-cutting
in the Alexa business unit [1].

[1] [https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-
new-...](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-skill-
making-money-from-alexa)

~~~
labradore
Does it seriously take 10k people to make Alexa? And she's way dumber than
Google. Yes, they should be cutting some costs.

~~~
logicchains
Maybe it's one of those many-if-statements style AIs.

~~~
rumanator
We prefer to call them decision trees. It sounds far fancier.

------
tzury
People with _real_ knowledge to the matter knows that GCP is growing, and more
companies are adopting GCP every month.

This is an attempt (which according to some of the comments here quite
succeed) to create a story where there is no story.

Should Google Cloud aim to be better and bigger? Sure. Should Google /
Alphabet execs need to discuss challenges and strategy? Sure.

What and where is the story?

GCP produce new products and features every week [1]

At my company, we use all major 3 clouds. The GCP support is super fast. The
GCP price is better than other two.

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 "attack" the market, build teams of sales,
marketing, and all the supporting infrastructure, and they do it.

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.

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.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/blog/](https://cloud.google.com/blog/)

~~~
jacquesm
> and more companies are adopting GCP every month

A rising tide lifts all boats. Are more companies adopting GCP because they
are leaving Amazon/Azure? Or is it simply because the market is still immature
and growing fast?

~~~
enos_feedler
Who cares if they are leaving Amazon or Azure. All that matters is they use
GCP too.

~~~
jacquesm
According to the title Google does. If the market matures and Google is not
able to win customers from Amazon/Azure then they will not attain that #1
position.

~~~
manigandham
Every company wants to be number 1. They don't stop making money and exit the
market just because they aren't.

~~~
jacquesm
Google did just that with G+, Hangouts, Checkout and a whole raft of others.
Even if you don't become #1 you owe it to your customers to plan ahead and to
ensure a business is 'unit cost profitable' at the scale at which you offer it
so that you can sustain it.

Going for broke on projects and then canning them when they fail to attract
the kind of success that a smaller company would be more than happy with is in
the long run a losing bet.

~~~
manigandham
None of those are enterprise products. Consumer businesses given away for free
are very different than directly selling infrastructure and services.

~~~
utopian3
Hangouts was a GSuite (enterprise) service. Customers were forced to move Chat
& Meet when they shut down Hangouts.

[https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-
hangou...](https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangouts-
service-consolidation.html)

~~~
manigandham
True, but that’s a replacement and upgrade to a new service. Do you consider
that the same as a shutdown with no alternative?

I’d say the biggest situation that materially affected companies was the
Google Maps pricing change, but most seem to be fine with that now.

------
scarface74
_The clock is ticking for Google Cloud.

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._

That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and
fuzzy.

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.

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.

Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Almost seems like it would have people looking for the eject button.

~~~
zerothOffset
Man my firm was looking into going ahead GCP and now this

~~~
faizshah
Its kind of ridiculous that _this_ is the moment in time they decided to pull
the plug. It feels like they leaked this to ensure they could get out of cloud
by 2024.

GCP cloud skills/certs have just started becoming marketable. Only recently
has GCP become something you can seriously suggest to managers and point to
BigQuery, Stack driver, firebase and cloud run as reasons to switch. Cloud
Run, dialogflow, bigquery and kubernetes engine are literally at the bleeding
edge of where the industry is going and Cloud Dataflow is seeing adoption
among lots of companies tired of running their own clusters.

It really seems like they leaked this to ensure they couldnt compete with AWS
and Azure so they can jump ship in 2023.

~~~
scarface74
And you’re kind of demonstrating why enterprises don’t take GCP seriously.

How is their enterprise support? The decision makers would hear everything you
say and you might as well be speaking Greek.

The one CYA question they are going to ask is where does GCP fall on the Magic
Quadrant? If things go wrong with GCP they will have to explain why they chose
it.

~~~
faizshah
You wouldnt mention jaeger or istio either to decision makers.

You would say we can cut operational costs and modernize big data
infrastructure while making our data warehouse more accessible(BigQuery). We
can save money when APIs arent being used (Cloud Run). We can process real
time data without increasing operational costs (Cloud Dataflow). We can debug
systems failures faster (Stackdriver). We can launch products and iterate
faster with a lightweight frontend team (Firebase). We can build
conversational interfaces rapidly (Dialogflow).

You reword in terms of results rather than tools for decision makers. Of
course this is all moot because you have to convince them google cloud wont
shut down by 2023.

~~~
scarface74
Most major decisions aren’t made by what is cheaper - it’s made by which is
safer.

~~~
faizshah
Making operations google’s problem is precisely what drives BigQuery, FaaS and
Dataflow adoption. Its operationally safer when you dont need a hadoop team to
maintain your data infrastructure.

See Nytimes, Twitter and Spotify for examples.

Now if you’re talking about future-safety there was an argument...until a few
hours ago.

~~~
scarface74
Again, you’re talking about what’s “operationally safer” not what’s
“reputationally safer”. If AWS goes down, no one is going to question your
decision - and you’re in the same boat as a lot of other people. If GCP goes
down and everyone else is up, people are going to ask a million question.

Every company you named isn’t the same thing as just arguing to the powers
that be - AWS is what Netflix uses. AWS has many more “referencable clients”
that matter.

------
shadowtree
They put the guy that ran ORACLE'S CLOUD STRATEGY in charge of GCP.

ORACLE'S. CLOUD. STRATEGY.

Let's hire Thomas Kurian, bang up job on Fusion and ... oh wait, what do you
mean with 'total failure'?

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.

~~~
gamblor956
Are we talking about the same Oracle Fusion that powers most of the world's
corporation's accounting backends today (including Netsuite, which Oracle
acquired several years ago)?

Because if so, he did a pretty good job of achieving his objective:
establishing market dominance in the face of superior competing products.

Hiring Kurian is a message to investors that Google is serious[1] about trying
to take over the cloud platform space, through any means necessary.

 _[1] At this moment, at least. Given Google 's history, their actual
commitment to their cloud platform remains to be seen._

~~~
StreamBright
>> powers most of the world's corporation's accounting backends today

Not sure how you come up with this. Is this backed with actual data?

~~~
ivalm
Didn't know about what Oracle Fusion is but wikipedia does claim high
adoption.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Fusion_Middleware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Fusion_Middleware)

------
zapita
AWS is unassailable as number one, but Azure is more fragile than they might
appear in their #2 position. _They use their Office online revenue to boost
their numbers (EDIT: apparently they don 't do that anymore)_, 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 / Outlook / AD / 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.

On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of
the three.

What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to
spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead.

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.

~~~
tuwtuwtuwtuw
> Azure’s technology stack is dreadful.

Can you describe what you are referring to here?

I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.

~~~
steverb
I've been quite pleased with the Azure stack myself. There is the issue of
figuring out what the marketing team named the damned thing you are looking
for, but I had the same problem with AWS.

I am focused primarily on .Net though, so your YMMV by a lot.

~~~
andybak
> There is the issue of figuring out what the marketing team named the damned
> thing you are looking for, but I had the same problem with AWS.

Does Azure have an equivalent for this invaluable resource?

[https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-
english/](https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/)

~~~
steverb
Oddly enough... the same site has it.

[https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-
english](https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english)

------
AaronFriel
As a Google Cloud Platform customer, this is pretty concerning news and seems
likely to drive me to start looking at alternatives _and also_ likely to avoid
placing any dependencies on Google-specific platform features.

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 "Kubernetes Apps", etc. Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute
VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes.

~~~
sitkack
All platforms not under your control should be viewed as a risk.

> Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the
> box Kubernetes.

I think this is perfectly healthy and a stance you should take everywhere.

~~~
scarface74
This is certainly not as true with Microsoft or AWS. You remember the old
saying that “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”? If someone bet the farm on
IBM in the 70s, they could still buy compatible systems.

Do you think you are at more risk betting your enterprise on Microsoft or
Google?

~~~
OnlineGladiator
> Do you think you are at more risk betting your enterprise on Microsoft or
> Google?

Microsoft? No.

Google? Absolutely.

I don't trust Google for anything that isn't related to selling ads. And I
trust they will maintain their relationship for God-fucking-awful customer
support. And I assume they will continue their tradition of sunsetting
projects haphazardly.

I don't know why anyone _would_ trust Google today.

~~~
skinkestek
After seeing how amazingly much better Facebook properties targets ads I won't
even trust Google to do that.

Lately I've been using Instagram multiple times a month and the ads I get
there are relvant, sometimes even useful (I once actually bought a product
from one such ad that I actually like and wouldn't have been aware of without,
and I am a typical HNer that have always said ads are wasted on me, because
they have been for 10 years).

Contrast this to Google who has way more datapoints on me yet end up showing
ads asking if I have old mens problems or suggest I join a dating site for
elderly. And that is just the icing on the cake: they've been pushing dating
sites ever since I got engaged over 5 years ago.

My account might be a fluke but I guess I am not allne.

~~~
delecti
I don't think you're a fluke at all. I've heard lots of "complaints" about how
accurate Instagram ads are, because the products being advertised are so
appealing. I've experienced it too, the ads I see on Instagram are almost all
things I could see myself buying.

------
Shakahs
I'm astounded that they would seriously consider closing GCP after committing
so much time, money, and effort into building it.

Every time there's a GCP story on HN commenters say "I won't use it because
Google can just pull the plug." I thought this opinion was silly as GCP is the
#3 cloud provider in the world, not a free service like Reader.

Guess I was wrong, nothing is safe. Google wants #1 or nothing at all.

~~~
asplake
However tempting (and it is very tempting), how much they’ve already spent
should never figure in this kind of decision (aka the sunk cost fallacy). What
matters is the return they will get from future commitments.

~~~
jjeaff
That, and the strong signaling it would create if they did drop it. That
signal being, never ever use a Google product for Enterprise purposes.

~~~
leppr
More precisely, always have a backup plan. Nothing wrong with running on GCP
if you're using it in a platform-abstract way (either by using it as a simple
hosting provider, or by going through a layer like the "serverless"
framework).

------
ronmex
I'm surprised that the overall sentiment of the comments indicates that
gcloud's offerings are inferior to aws / azure. I'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't mean it's the best.

~~~
yuy910616
Bigquery is excellent too

~~~
faizshah
BigQuery is by far their killer app. Every place Ive interviewed for or worked
with that uses GCP uses it mainly for BigQuery.

Dataflow and Cloud Run are likely to be up there soon.

------
Despegar
I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw this headline on Twitter. It's
just _kisses fingers_.

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'll be a duopoly.

If you'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's
not going to be that.

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].

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-
clo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-
competition.html)

[2] [https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-
ft...](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-ftc-
antitrust-scrutiny-report-2019-12)

~~~
harryh
_If you 're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of
your workloads as possible_

The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability
to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their
ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your
own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will
only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.

~~~
zelly
The person you have to hire to manage that would cost 10x a public cloud bill

~~~
Youden
There are options other than "put your entire infrastructure on Amazon" and
"hire someone fulltime to manage your physical infrastructure".

Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's
_definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just
set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies.

So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these
things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's
common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP).

And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS
is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing
anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the
hell away from any kind of cloud.

------
roystonvassey
I worked with GCP on a small (<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.

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'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'm happy I didn't get the rest of my team involved in
it.

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's
currently.

~~~
acruns
I have done a few GCP projects and this is the typical OP of the google team.
I think their intentions are good, trying to make sure you get everything
perfect, but customers do not really care to spend all the corresponding time
updating the google team twice a week for something that would be better
served with as-needed support.

And there can be a flavor of condesending attitude when they assume the
customer doesn't know anything.

------
fredley
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's
interest in GCP.

Why would you ever consider GCP over AWS/Azure knowing that the Google scythe
could kill it at any time, with your suspicions confirmed by a leak this?
Bonkers.

~~~
jfoster
It's so stupid that they've got this reputation now. A lot of the things
they've killed could've instead been sold/spun off instead. Shutting down
successful services that are not successful enough by Google's standards has
given them a bad rep at the same time as destroying value.

Reader could've been a successful company on its own for sure, for example. I
wasn't a user of it, but there was enough people who loved it enough.

~~~
xvector
It’s a well-deserved reputation. I’m glad it’s sticking

~~~
setr
He meant it was stupid that Google let itself gain this reputation; it was
easily avoidable

------
codingslave
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.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
I do think their engineers have likely slipped in quality over the years, but
that's not the problem. The problem is their culture of product managers being
rewarded for launching projects and nobody being rewarded for maintaining
projects. They financially incentivize people to launch and kill projects.

It sounds like a leadership problem, because only leadership can change the
culture like that.

~~~
numbsafari
That, and the absolute 100% lack of customer support or engagement.

Unless you are a Fortune 100, they don't do support.

Want to move an SMB with 50+ employees to Chromebooks with Chrome Enterprise?
You literally cannot pay Google to support you. You have to work with one of
their third-party vendors, who all suck.

Perhaps with Brin and Page finally leaving, this is something that can change.
But, I doubt it will, since they hired the leadership that's implemented their
vision. The next chapter of Google is likely to be how Sundar Pichai leads
them to the brink.

~~~
x86_64Ubuntu
"The next chapter of Google is likely to be how Sundar Pichai leads them to
the brink."

Damn, that's dark.

------
raiyu
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.

I don'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.

Doesn't exactly instill confidence in your customers to trust you for the
service you provide.

~~~
scarface74
Why not abandon a project that isn’t successful just because you invested
billions? Doing the opposite is the definition of the “sunk cost fallacy”.

~~~
macintux
Sometimes it's worth running a project at a loss in exchange for other
benefits, such as enterprises' trust that you will be a good product steward.

If they kill GCP, what CTO in their right mind would ever choose Google for a
mission critical service?

~~~
scarface74
Has Google ever shown to be good product stewards or to know how to engender
the trust of their customers?

------
cek
Reminds me of Ray Noorda[1]. Nothing good ever happens when companies focus
entirely on their competitors. If Google really wants to beat Amazon &
Microsoft in "Cloud", they should focus entirely on the customer and the value
they can provide that customer.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Noorda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Noorda)

~~~
Angostura
Noorda’s problem was that his product - a file server was swiftly turning into
a commodity

~~~
cek
What about WordPerfect?

Noorda's problem was he was completely, utterly, obsessed with his
competition.

~~~
Angostura
I interviewed him a few times and I don't think that was strictly true.
Perhaps near the end where Windows NT and OS/2 were taking chunks out of
Netware

------
umvi
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'm afraid
something will go wrong and I won't be able to talk to a human. I've heard so
many stories about the "stone wall" that is Google customer support. Also, I'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't want to support anymore.

~~~
crazygringo
You're confusing Google customer support for their free consumer products
(nonexistent) with support for paid services.

Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure.

Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being
anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas.

I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near
Apple's excellent support. But again, _zero_ to do with Cloud.

It's literally as silly as saying you won't use AWS because Amazon won't give
you a refund on a shirt you ordered.

~~~
thesuperbigfrog
Part of Google's problem is that Amazon _will_ give you a refund on a shirt
you ordered and then have customer support walk you through setting up AWS
services to run your website.

Amazon is _obsessively focused_ on keeping customers happy and will bend over
backward to do so. Google does not have a similar reputation or history.

~~~
mark-r
Google is quite the opposite, they only do things that scale. Making customers
happy isn't something that scales, so they avoid it actively.

~~~
thesuperbigfrog
>> Making customers happy isn't something that scales

Amazon is able to scale 'making customers happy' fairly well.

It is all about the company's priorities and the direction that the leaders
steer the company. Perverse incentives reap perverse rewards.

~~~
mark-r
Sorry, I left out a key part of my argument. Google scales by automating
everything they can, keeping people out of the way. Making customers happy
isn't something you can automate, it requires the human touch.

------
doublement
Every company should question the businesses they'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.

------
dang
As with previous articles, The Information has unlocked this one for HN
readers. Thanks!

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22the%20information%22%20unlock&sort=byDate&type=comment)

------
Scramblejams
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'd shut it down, and
switching clouds has a cost. I considered myself near-crazy for making the
decision on that basis -- they wouldn't do that, would they?! that's silly!
that's ridiculous! -- and was a little embarrassed to reveal my rationale to
others. Saying it out loud sounded so alarmist, so far-fetched.

And yet here we are. Glad I kept clutching those pearls.

#2 by 2023? Good luck. I wouldn't bet a dollar on them knocking Amazon or
Microsoft off their perches by then, and I won't spend another dollar on GCP.

~~~
amiller2571
I no longer use any of Google's services and neither does my employer for this
reason.

We did have one application running on their cloud, but decided to move it to
aws because we just can't trust them to keep anything around. Every year we
had to rebuild some part of our app, because they replaced or completely
removed some feature we were using. It got old and we were done with it...

------
sdnlafkjh34rw
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.

------
jpeg_hero
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.

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.

Maybe gutting the product org all those years ago was a mistake.

~~~
Will_Do
I agree with the general sentiment. It is staggering that they have spent at
least 10s of billions if not > 100b trying to diversify away from ads and
still do not have meaningful alternative revenue stream. It is one of the
biggest mysteries to me. How is it possible to throw so much money and so many
smart people at so many different problems and have no results? Microsoft and
Amazon don't seem to have this problem but Facebook seems to suffer as well.

That being said, their advertising business is insanely successful. I suspect
they could at least double their stock price (and thus the wealth of their
investors) if they dumped their speculative bets and focus on ads. It is
extremely profitable and revenue keeps growing > 20% from a large base.

~~~
jpeg_hero
Yeah, ads best medium since golden age of tv and it’s not like it’s all
strikeouts. They’ve had insanely successful addons:

\- maps

\- gmail / google domains / docs

\- chrome / chrome box / chrome books

\- Android

\- YouTube

It just seem like the “dream is dead”. Great business though.

~~~
jiqiren
All of these (minus google domains) are to bolster their ad business.

------
lordnacho
You have to wonder whether "must be number 1 or 2" came out of some pop-
management text.

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't at least mention GCP instead of AWS?

Google being as profitable as it is can afford options. Why not sit around in
number 3 spot?

~~~
jcrites
The article claims, if I understood it correctly, that GCP will not be
profitable unless it reaches the scale of being at least #2. The implication
is that economies of scale are necessary for profitability.

For example, in 2014, James Hamilton spoke about how every day that year, AWS
was adding enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon's global
infrastructure when it was a $7B annual revenue enterprise (2004). That scale
of build-out, server purchasing, etc. presumably justifies and enables
significant cost reductions, such as buying equipment from vendors in bulk
with steep discounts, or buying or building large facilities at once, etc. AWS
is custom designing many parts of its stack including networking chips and
software, ARM-based CPUs, and more; that kind of investment is only worthwhile
at a certain large scale. This scale presumably motivated AWS's purchase of
chipmaker Annapurna Labs in 2015. Some operator of a few colocation
facilities, by comparison, could not justify designing custom silicon since
their scale would not allow them to recoup the R&D costs. Before AWS reached
whatever scale made these kinds of investments worthwhile, they were
purchasing commodity hardware.

To pick another example, a company like SpaceX can only be profitable if it
launches a certain minimum number of rockets per year. Without enough rocket
launches, and demand from customers, you can't recoup the R&D budget needed to
design them.

Google has a head start in cloud because their company's existing facilities
are already huge. However, public infrastructure has different demands than
internal infrastructure, and it sounds like the necessary investments in
public have been costly.

~~~
lordnacho
But there's a subtle difference between being big enough to make profits and
ranking. If you need X amount of business to make profits, why does it matter
whether one or two guys make X+ ?

If you take your SpaceX example, they need to launch some number of rockets.
So what if someone else is launching more?

Why isn't the minimum expressed as a % of the market for example?

------
flipgimble
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.

------
partiallypro
Nothing makes me want to subscribe to a company'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/women.

 _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._

------
faizshah
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.

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.

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.

------
johnnycab
The analysis from the Gartner Magic Quadrant circa July 2019, states some of
it's concerns/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.

"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."

"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."

------
bitL
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's
too late, competition improved their mediocre offerings and outside TPUs there
is no advantage anymore.

~~~
codingslave
From what I have heard, a ton of google internal infrastructure is actually
aging and not as nimble by todays standards. It was innovative in 2010, but
has been largely commoditized.

~~~
bitL
My point was that had they initially released cloud based on what they had at
the time, AWS would have had a very hard time competing. These days as you
mentioned their competitors moved on and even K8S is surpassing Borg in some
ways.

------
mongol
Makes me very reluctant to build something in Google's cloud. Can they not see
value in being third as long as it is profitable?

~~~
jey
Yeah, why not play the long game by focusing on providing a great experience
for developers? Enable today's hobbyists to start the companies of tomorrow on
your platform, and let go of chasing the #1 spot with enterprise customers of
today. Cloud computing as a market isn't going anywhere, and demand is only
going to grow for the foreseeable future.

Google already has a leg up on this, their cloud offerings and APIs make a lot
more sense than AWS.

------
cynusx
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' 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.

For example, I'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.

I haven't looked at GCP in a long time, but I remember everything being very
python-centric and very lightly documented.

Winning in technology often comes down to having a serious customer-centric
product management function.

------
brown9-2
> Ultimately, the Google executives decided in the spring of 2018 that the
> cloud computing opportunity was simply too big to give up on.

All of the anecdotes in this article are from early to mid 2018.

So why is someone leaking these stores 18 months later?

~~~
pasttense01
Because it took a long time to finally reach someone who was willing to leak
it (plus article preparation and editing time).

------
dragonwriter
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.”

Detailed multi-year strategic planning as a change from 18-month plans seems
more consistent with a _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_ than it is with
increased pressure for short-term results. Increased pressure for immediate
results tends to be accompanied by reduced long-term planning.

------
exabrial
Never used Google for anything important.

You'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't matter to their bottom line.

~~~
darkwizard42
They offer excellent customer support for GCP. I think you are conflating this
with YouTube or other services.

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

~~~
scarface74
This has to be fake even though they have history of doing just that?

------
summerlight
I'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/OpEx is supposed to be very large.

~~~
rifung
I don't think revenue matters as much as profits?

I assume the thinking is that if the ROI is not high enough, then you might as
well just invest that money into the more profitable portions of your
business.

~~~
summerlight
The problem is that there's no real way to measure and appropriately attribute
expense and profit to cloud; most infrastructures are shared across Google
products and cloud. Simply put, none of ads, search or YT cannot exist without
the cloud infrastructure.

------
Analemma_
> If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe
> that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely.

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'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.

~~~
londons_explore
Google Cloud was always a "become number one or die" thing. Same with Google
Plus.

Google has assigned so many engineers to building and running the platform.
That means the platform has a high ongoing cost to provide. Unless the
platform grows rapidly and grabs a significant chunk of the market, it will
never be profitable at Googles current level of investment.

You can't scale a project down from 5000 engineers to just 50 and expect it to
carry on running as before.

------
whatitdobooboo
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.

The tech is there - but alignment isnt. I dont know if Google is capable of
anything outside of search.

------
rogerkirkness
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.

------
chupa-chups
I don't understand how an enterprise as big as google doesn't have the energy
to simply eat through time and money until it succeeds.

Even if the share has to be divided forever between 3 major cloud providers,
it would eventually pay off.

~~~
kresten
>> simply eat through time and money until it succeeds.

That was Microsoft’s Bing versus Google strategy.

Money can’t necessarily buy market dominance, even vast quantities of money.

~~~
scarmig
Didn't Bing end up profitable?

------
gorbachev
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're falling more behind every day.

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.

------
joobus
The Google cemetery is calling...
[https://gcemetery.co/](https://gcemetery.co/)

~~~
antisthenes
One day, Google itself will appear there and things will have come full
circle.

------
spbyrne
This feels like a threat. Are they going to graveyard Google cloud? Probably
not. But they've discontinued so many random, good services that I'm cautious
to 'learn' a new Google tool. I wouldn'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.

------
ogre_codes
Even prior to this supposed leak, it would be really difficult as a developer
to build anything reliant on Google's technology stack. There is a huge number
of killed projects; abandoned platforms; and projects like maps where low/ no
fees have become prohibitively expensive.

Building atop Google is betting the farm on a fickle master.

~~~
sixothree
And no offense to the Google team, but they are just awful at UI. I cannot
imagine using anything Google related to manage complex hosting scenarios.

~~~
ogre_codes
Well Amazon isn't exactly the king of great UI either and I'm not in love with
Azure's cloud services platform management tools. All of these platforms have
an extremely dense set of options which tend to change fast which leads to a
very tough UI challenge and rapid UI rot.

~~~
sixothree
Definitely prefer Azure in terms of UI at least than AWS. I don't even want to
know what google is doing with management.

------
bobbydreamer
These statements just made me remember a quote from Will ferrels movie. Ricky
Bobby : Wait, Dad. Don't you remember the time you told me "If you ain't
first, you're last"?

Reese Bobby : Huh? What are you talking about, Son?

Ricky Bobby : That day at school.

Reese Bobby : Oh hell, Son, I was high that day. That doesn't make any sense
at all, you can be second, third, fourth... hell you can even be fifth.

Ricky Bobby : What? I've lived my whole life by that!

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.

Number of people visiting their yearly Sessions are increasing and their
training platforms(Qwiklabs & YouTube videos) are very much precise. Most of
the issues are solved in Stackoverflow itself and you have Google groups for
each products.

------
dangerboysteve
I'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.

------
tanilama
There is NO WAY to retire Google Cloud...

This is the ultimate suicide you need to take to destroy public trust, once
and for all.

~~~
scarface74
Have you been following Google?

~~~
tanilama
Closely yes.

But I think even the idea of retiring is insane. This is not any free customer
facing product. The impact is totally different.

~~~
scarface74
You mean like Google Fiber?

~~~
bduerst
The purpose of Fiber was to push Comcast, ATT, and other incumbents to start
installing fiber internet, which they have. Same as how Fi is focused on
pushing cell phone providers to lower data costs and provide pay as you go,
which they have.

Cloud is selling extra server space in the same data centers that support
Youtube.

~~~
scarface74
So was part of that “purpose” to tear up roads by “micro trenching” and then
abandon the effort?

And they aren’t just selling spare capacity. They are purposefully building
out servers and products for customers.

------
pcurve
They debated about it but it's a nearly 10 bil per year business now. Why
would they walk away from it now?

~~~
rasz
Because its <10% of their real revenue(ads) source. Non-ad revenue generates
~15%, its a distraction.

------
ocdtrekkie
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.

A big nugget from behind the paywall: "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."

The article also claims Google Cloud isn't profitable under their current
business plan: "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."

~~~
localhost
Curious about what others think of the price. $399/year is pretty steep.
Compared to, say Ben Thompson who I do subscribe to for $120/year. For younger
(<=30) folks, there's a $199/year discounted price.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It's super steep. I think that their target market is businesses and people
who can afford it. But I jumped on it when they offered the young
professionals plan. Really just to support them over the exclusive access side
of things.

------
ogre_codes
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.

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'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's platform.

------
stopads
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.

Too absurd for reality.

~~~
Lutger
Did you miss that the complete headline is actually 'Google execs reportedly
debated getting out of cloud computing, but instead set a goal of being a top-
two player by 2023'?

Or is it more the fact they considered it at all?

~~~
vbezhenar
"If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe
that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely."

------
theflyinghorse
The thread is mostly concentrating on the negatives here. I'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't
rally care as I have no clue if I'll have a business in the next 12 month.

Of course, this article does say "The Google unit, which sells computing
services to big companies" with emphasis on "big", but maybe there will be
some trickle down for the small fry amongst it all.

------
yyyk
There's no way for Google Cloud to achieve this. Even if Google does
everything _perfectly_ , both AWS and Azure are just too entrenched to be
dethroned in such a short period of time.

Therefore, this story is almost equivalent to saying 'Google will ignore cloud
from 2023 onward'. Were I ever to consider GCP, this alone would cause me to
run far far away.

 _If_ 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's credibility.

------
eejjjj82
"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."

This is purposefully misleading.

From the Q3 2019 10-Q:
[https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001...](https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204419000032/goog10-qq32019.htm)

Ad revenue: 33.9B Other revenue: 6.4B

"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."

"Other revenues" is up nearly 40% q/q compared to Q3 2018:

"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)."

------
m0zg
If they're going aggressively for market share this could only mean one thing:
price war. They'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'm all for it. The current pricing in all
three clouds is nuts.

------
paggle
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.

------
AndrewBissell
"Google brass" are basically Alec Baldwin's soulless asshole character from
GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS:

"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all
know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody wanna see second prize?
Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired."

------
ggm
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.

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?

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.

------
netwanderer3
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'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't have any clue of how to actually
turn those advanced cloud services into something more useful than just
hosting. It's not a capability issue but rather it's a use case problem.

------
m0zg
I actually don't think that's what happened at all. Best I can tell, this was
a multi-year, aggressive, OKR-like goal. You're not expected to 100% achieve
your OKRs at Google. 100% on everything indicates your OKRs are not aggressive
enough and you're sandbagging. You're merely saying: "I think this is worth
doing and I'll commit serious effort to achieving this". I don't know why
people are concluding that if world domination doesn't happen by 2023 Google
will set its cloud datacenters on fire.

Or, to be perfectly honest, I do know: it's to drive outrage and clicks.

Google is not going shutter any business which brings in more than $1B in
profit per year. It never has, and it never will.

Disclosure: ex-Googler, GCP user, hold no position in company stock.

------
whatitdobooboo
Google* isnt really an enterprise focused company. Getting talent and
management to work on it must be tough, and internally I'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.

------
spicyramen
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/Microsoft have been there
always...new things in Infrastructure...probably not unless you really don't
want to give any business to AWS (Walmart/Target) and experimenting the new
enterprise Google...no thanks

------
tekkk
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 "Google is killing GCP, they r
so dum".

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.

But so what, Google thinks it can beat AWS and Azure? Well, it'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't achieve those goals, I
don't see it as a big of problem as people seem to think. I mean other cloud
providers don't even _have_ that amount of money to put into their cloud
businesses' and no one is lamenting about that.

To me this whole debate should be about how impractical and out of touch with
customers Google has become since.. I can't even recall. Maybe it's the
algorithm-based engineer interviews but something's wrong with Google's
internal workings. Google Analytics' dashboard is still terrible, I don't like
even how Google Docs work, Youtube is I guess ok but they blundered the live-
streaming et cetera. I've never used GCP but it always seemed a bit too over-
designed and flashy and, well, not practical. On the other hand AWS's console,
even though it is at times unintuitive it feels for some reason quite nice and
practical. It's weird and subjective, I know.

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.

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.

------
Despacito2019
As someone who literally have a decision to make tomorrow for a large move
from Azure/Hosted to consolidate GCP I may have to send a few email to
postpone that meeting... This is really bad for GCP

------
lwh
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't going to consider the other vendors much when there's
such a direct migration. Combined with headcount and capital cost reduction so
clearly mapped out for them.

------
40four
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.

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?

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.

~~~
cavisne
One of the things that google does is basically trade compute and storage
(whether its a google search or gmail storage) for advertising revenue.

In a world where the public cloud is dominated by a handful of providers its
likely (if not already the case) that AWS will become by far the biggest buyer
(with the best economics) of compute and storage.

Obviously there are many other barriers to competing with google, but if
amazon could provision the amount of storage and compute needed for YouTube
and search in the headroom of its public cloud (and even worse if AWS
customers could do this for a cheaper cost than google itself) this would be a
negative thing for google.

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

------
devit
Maybe they could consider applying more reasonable pricing?

E.g. Hetzner offers an 8-core 128GB Xeon SkyLake machine with unlimited 1gbps
traffic for around $120/month while Google offers n1-highmem-8 with 8 cores
and 52GB and no traffic for $240/month.

1gbps unlimited traffic on Hetzner means 324 TB/month, which would cost 26000$
on GCP at the lowest 0.08$/GB rate.

So I would consider cutting the instance prices by half, and dividing the
bandwidth prices by 1000, and then they will be competitive.

------
sillysaurusx
For what it's worth, I've had nothing but positive experiences with GCP plus
TFRC: [https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc](https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc)

(If I had negative experiences, believe me, I'd be the first to point them
out. Just a happy user.)

There are a few annoying aspects of GCP, but the complexity seems roughly
equal to AWS. Both have their pain points.

The $300 free credit is immensely helpful. I hope Google keeps it.

------
alexnewman
We use almost every cloud.

Currently I see

GCP TPU options beat the pants off of everyone. I love bigquery.

Azure has by far the best storage options. The bucket storage is much cheaper.
The azure file storage is best of class. I don't like it's bigquery/athena
alternatives

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.

We are firing up our IBM cloud presence now.

~~~
dralley
>We are firing up our IBM cloud presence now.

I'm curious as to how this will change with the acquisition of Red Hat. It's
still too recent to see any kind of impact yet.

~~~
alexnewman
They already are making the same mistakes as other vendors. They think the
managed openstack/k8s services are something that big people use. The reality
is tools like kops or aks-engine support a much more stable cluster.

------
trenning
Off topic: The link for this article is,

[https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-
set-202...](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-
deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud)
?pu=hackernewsyw3xln&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock

How did it end up with utm_source=hackernews in the url? Dang is this
something you change or is it user submitted?

------
kresten
Does this mean google cloud is closing by that date?

What isn’t google going to close?

Would it be reasonable to now run a headline “Google to close cloud in 2023
following failure to dominate”

------
joejerryronnie
Wow, this seriously highlights Google's lack of understanding regarding
enterprise customers. Enterprise purchase decisions I'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'd
have to scrap in 4 years if Google decides to defund GCP.

------
achow
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.

Google just can't compete with hustlers like Amazon, Alibaba and to some
extent Microsoft (ex-Oracle leader not withstanding). Cloud business is
commodity operational business.

~~~
sneak
Just spitballing: what if they rented compute based on sandboxed access to the
huge trove of behavioral and activity data they have on their users (which
amounts to everyone who uses the web)?

It would be the ultimate differentiator. The only potential competitor would
be Facebook, who doesn’t offer cloud services.

~~~
londons_explore
It's next to impossible to do this at scale while maintaining user privacy.

There are some differential privacy techniques which might help, but so far
they're rather hard to use and there is no tooling for such things.

~~~
sneak
The United States has no data protection laws to speak of (over this kind of
data). Renting/selling access to run queries over this sort of data is
entirely legal. All it would take is another half dozen years of our society
continuing to move in the direction it has already on privacy.

It may just be de jure legal though; I bet it would be shown to be de facto
illegal once people started mining data from federal judges and legislators...

------
jl2718
Has this become just a commodity war, or are there major sustainably exclusive
technology/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?

------
sytelus
I'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.

------
ruxx
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.

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

~~~
setr
Do or die

------
linsomniac
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'm my YouTube comments... :-)

------
bcheung
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't see a
strong benefit over others.

------
kerng
Well, it'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!

------
xj9
i run a bunch of services for some online social clubs and foss projects that
i'm involved in. i'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'm working on setting up some colo infrastructure. i'll
probably keep some of the cloud stuff around for failover and maybe some edge
cache type stuff, but you don't really need cloud unless you have extremely
variable loads on your system.

i won't say cloud isn't nice, i've been able to learn a lot by playing around
with cloud servers. just good to remember that cloud isn't the only option for
a lot of workloads.

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

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

~~~
ianamartin
I imagine google will keep the technology around to support their own
products. I read this to mean they will stop selling access to it.

~~~
_vertigo
I find it hard to believe that Stadia would outlast GCloud, but then again I
find this entire kerfluffle hard to believe..

------
Havoc
#1 or #2 seems like such an arbitrary objective.

Besides the notion of Google not investing in cloud seems rather ludicrous to
me. They might as well formally announce that they're not competing in tech
going forward & just count adtech dollars instead.

------
z3t4
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.

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

~~~
ar_lan
"Search" will no longer be supported beginning January 1, 2021.

~~~
samspenc
I know you said that in jest, but in all seriousness, I think search and ads
will definitely be around since they are the #1 player and making boatloads of
money from search and ads.

Google seems to have a tendency to shut down products that meet the following
criteria:

[1] Free products that could have millions or billions of users, but no
revenue or not enough revenue to justify a team working on it [2] Free or paid
products in which Google is NOT #1

I am as shocked as everyone else that Google would consider shutting down GCP
if it's not #2 by 2023. I would have thought they would treat enterprise
business very differently from their consumer business ... but I guess not.

I am also extremely skeptical they'll be able to make it to #2 over the next 4
years. So I guess we might as well say goodbye to GCP at this point.

------
gpresot
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.

------
jaimex2
Sorry Google, you need a time machine to fix this one.

No one trusts your products to stick around or has the confidence that you
won't shut down their accounts overnight due to an automation thinking
something is wrong.

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

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

------
sunstone
So this is a PR disaster for GCP. Already people are penciling out contingency
plans because this inept leak. And Google's history of shuttering stuff really
doesn't help.

------
ece
There is at least one way Google can get out of this mess:

1) Do serverless through standards and avoid vendor lock-in

There's a huge opportunity for a cloud vendor who has a credible zero lock-in
offering.

------
Trias11
Google brass just fell off and reshuffled at the very top?

I think it's prudent to give them some time for internal dust to settle before
buying into "conquer the world" deadlines.

------
gigatexal
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.

------
bitwize
Dream on, Goog. You're third in a three-horse race. You need a serious, and I
mean _serious_ value add to beat Amazon in a LOB where they bring their A
game.

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

------
oarabbus_
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.

------
gigatexal
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.

------
mynegation
> to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively

Does that imply that Microsoft is first and Amazon is second? That is
surprising to me.

~~~
paragraft
Yes they goofed on that. They do correctly state marketshares later in the
article (i.e AWS #1)

------
prepend
> Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud
> market share

Isn’t this backwards? I thought aws was quite a bit bigger than azure.

------
keithnz
this is weird,

GOOGLE: we want to to be in the top 2 or we will throw our toys and leave /
defund.

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/aws.

heck if I was using them now, and saw this, I'd be making plans/contingencies
to shift off them.

------
mc32
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.

------
Despacito2019
Where would that would leave kubernetes? would they scale down their
investment on kubernetes and all asociated project like knative ?

------
seshagiric
It's a bit odd that the products like Kubernetes came from Google Cloud but
they themselves are struggling in the market.

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

------
oarabbus_
GCP is more customizable/better for edge cases of power users, but AWS is
better for something like 90% of users

------
ilovecaching
It's crazy what Google is willing to kill. I mean if GCloud gets shut down,
what hope is there for Stadia?

~~~
xvector
There isn’t. Anyone who bought Stadia either doesn’t care about losing their
purchases or is deluding themselves.

------
gmanstar
Its a very practical decision, but it becoming public totally screws GCP's
credibility in the market

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

------
asdfq1234
These cloud players need to reduce prices. AWS has not significantly reduced
prices in a long time.

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

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

------
iblaine
GCP generates $8B annually. It'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.

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

------
annoyingnoob
Google can keep its cloud and I'll keep my data. Its the best way.

------
Toury2d
Is hacker News turning into Reddit with all these comments?

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

~~~
filoleg
IIRC Google killed off a lot of products that were profitable. They just
decided it was not profitable enough by their own arbitrary metrics, not that
it wasn’t profitable at all

------
yc_2345
I have sometimes wondered why they don't offer a separate, uncomplicated fixed
price (and bounded resource) version - basically like a Heroku - and provide a
migration path to their core offerings.

~~~
slig
Isn't that AppEngine?

~~~
ReverseCold
AppEngine is priced very high and is definitely not a constant price. I'm
using it right now, and it costs me $5/day to run an Elixir/Phoenix app for
~2000 active users. I'm leaving as soon as my free credit runs out.

------
outside1234
The Google Cloud employees should unionize.

------
d--b
Well first they need to get out of beta!

------
southphillyman
What would this mean for the NYC office?

------
airnomad
Google needs to buy Cloudflare.

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

------
outside1234
DEPRECATION NOTICE

------
staticassertion
Non-paywalled link?

~~~
freehunter
There's another story climbing the front page right now reporting similar
information without a paywall: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-
reportedly-wants-to-b...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-
wants-to-be-top-two-player-in-cloud-by-2023.html)

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

~~~
nemothekid
Who's number 3? Who am I missing?

~~~
hwbehrens
Gartner ranked Aliyun as the third largest provider in 1Q19.

~~~
benburleson
As a fulltime web dev, I had a guess of who's cloud that was, but had to look
the name up.

They may have numbers due to Chinese usage, but no Western company is going to
use Chinese hosting, ever.

------
mark_l_watson
Good luck to them.

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.

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).

------
Asooka
The engineers from Amazon, Google and Microsoft should get together and make
sure they'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.

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

~~~
dannykwells
The Information is always light years ahead of other tech sources. Probably
the #1 tech reporting outlet. So yes, no one is skeptical.

Edit: noticed you work on Google. So that about explains it.

