
Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud - yannikyeo
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/google-may-have-to-get-used-to-third-place-in-the-cloud
======
lalos
Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that
wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On
the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being
deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better,
the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft
for support reasons. Microsoft talks the enterprise talk and walks the
enterprise walk. Google probably has a fun and hackster image in the eyes of
enterprise.

~~~
VikingCoder
I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS
launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.

I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust &
goodwill.

~~~
shittyadmin
> I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS
> launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.

How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know
many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows
10 you can _still_ install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to
compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartphone and
you'll see the difference.

~~~
jazzyjackson
Not to mention that windows still sticks with carriage return + line feed to
maintain compatibility with the 1960s.

~~~
lozenge
Notepad & its underlying text box component support Unix style line endings
now.

------
ewhauser421
I see a lot of Google Cloud bashing on this thread, so thought I'd share my
viewpoint as a customer.

We've been a Google Cloud customer for close to a year now and just recently
signed a deal to move all of our infrastructure over to them from AWS. I've
previously managed infrastructure spends of $>10M a year on AWS before, so
have a decent amount of experience with them. I've never used Azure.

We had been running our CI/CD pipelines on Google mostly because we received
startup credits from them. Over time, our use cases expanded as we adopted
BigQuery for data warehousing. We choose to commit to Google long term because
we've been a heavy Kubernetes shop in got tired of managing it ourselves on
Amazon. We participated in the Amazon EKS alpha and felt that they were years
behind Google in their Kubernetes implementation. We have probably been able
to save 1-2 DevOps hires this year by adopting some of Google's managed
services.

If there is a downside on the technical side, it is that some of their
products don't have the same number of features as Amazon such a prefix
signing and reporting on GCS. There also isn't the same level of community
awareness on how to use their stack so documentation gaps are more painful.
Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the
future as well.

On the business side, Google has been amazing to work with. Whenever we have a
technical question, the sales team has generally been able to quickly get us
an answer or we've got to talk to the product PM. When working with Amazon,
you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough
technical questions. Google is very open with early access releases as long as
you're willing to provide them feedback - which they truly value. Their sales
processes aren't as mature as that of an established enterprise company -
which can be a good or a bad thing - but they've certainly earned our trust as
an enterprise customer.

In some ways, any of the big 3 are going to have marks against them in some
way as they just do too many things for them not to piss you off in some way.
I wasn't a fan of Microsoft a decade ago because they regularly killed open
source products I liked by releasing their own version of it under the
Microsoft name.

When looking for partner I'm looking for someone who can accelerate my
business and earn my trust. So far, that's what I've gotten from this
relationship.

~~~
outworlder
> Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the
> future as well.

Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are
"in China" in name only.

For instance, 'AWS' China is not AWS, you will be dealing with Sinnet for
Beijing or whoever else operates the Ningxia region. The underlying software
is a baby version which doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of
features. Frankly, the only benefits vs a local cloud provider are that the
name is still retained (so you have your bases covered if anyone complains)
and the API is AWS compatible.

It is a similar story on the other clouds. So I wouldn't weight this that
heavily against Google.

Also, all of this only applies if you have boots on the ground. It's not like
one can just create an account in China and run with it. It's an expensive and
lengthy process.

~~~
mcbain
I’m not sure what you are angling at here.

The China regions might not have all the AWS services present, and they have
some extra restrictions, but they aren’t some kind of clones of AWS software.

Unless I’m missing something, they are the same versions of what runs in the
other regions.

~~~
halbritt
You can't go into the AWS console and select a region in China and then
provision resources.

AWS-China is literally a different organization with a different service on a
different URI and with whom you'll need to establish a different contractual
relationship.

~~~
posnet
It's a different 'partition' the same way that govcloud is a different
partition. Separate for legal reasons, but the same technology underneath.

------
tzury
From product perspective, Google cloud is far ahead from AWS and Azure.

As one who runs a company that operates on all 3, serving over 3b+ HTTPS
requests daily, across 250K of web apps, in all continents, I can say clear
and simple:

    
    
        GCP Compute, Networking stack and storage are a superior product when compared to AWS and Azure.
    
    

For every dollar you pay:

    
    
      - You get more compute power per core, while paying less.
    
      - You get faster network, internal and external, with an amazing layer of load-balancing and Anycast IP.
    
      - You get the best "data processing at scale".
    
    

Google has a business problem rather than product. A smart man once told me,

    
    
        In B2C, the one with the better product is most likely to win.
        In B2B, the one with the larger sales team will.
    

Perhaps, Google is still learning that vast majority of business, especially
the larger ones are not about easy self sign up, rather face-to-face meetings,
price quotes, negotiations, etc. It is a different culture that almost as
oppose to how they used to run things thus far.

Figures don't lie however, and revenue streams are the oxygen of a business.

All it takes for GCP to get the crown would be a series of right and bold
decisions by its executives, which I hope they will make those eventually,
since the product deserves a wider recognition.

~~~
gibba999
... and you get what you pay for. Whenever I've had a problem on AWS, I've
spoken to a human being, and had a detailed information on what was happening
and how they were fixing it.

I don't have a support plan through Amazon, but I do a bit of business there
(now).

When I had a problem with Google, the response was a stone wall. Online FAQs
and no one to talk to. Even security issues, they blow people off on.

I wouldn't base a business on the Google Cloud. Too big a risk.

~~~
plantain
I have no idea how you are getting someone to talk to from AWS without paying.
I have had 10k/mo spend with both and without a support plan you get
absolutely nothing, and with they fall over themselves to help, calling you
immediately after filing tickets.

~~~
gibba999
Some of the projects I work on are pretty high-profile. I assumed they did
that for everybody, but perhaps that lead to special treatment?

------
ggm
AWS: a web gui with 200 options, some of which have 200 menu items to select
from. Experts work well. neophytes are stuck behind canned recipies which are
limited. Want IPv6? deploy a /56 _explicitly_ to locations, because they
didn't pre-can a model to manage it for you. What?

command line tools in JSON are pretty good however. Can drive from shell.

Azure: too young. Tried k8s, the fit was awful. I'm told by people who don't
know, but speak to gossips there is a metric french tonne of 'reboot it again'
going on behind the scenes.

I never got to a point I could _test_ if I could drive from the shell. it just
wasn't baked.

GCP: its 2018. Google still can't do native IPv6. That aside, this is the
interface I wanted all along. I drive this from the shell every day. We live
in k8s.

------
Arqu
Touching on big G trying to catch up - I've recently had some issues with GCP
and while the addition of more accessible support (you can now reach some
support person relatively easy) it helps little unless it's a request that
they can handle with a single button press. While it now FEELS less
frustrating as you have somebody to talk to, it doesn't help that I have an
issue that is being ping-ponged around different reps for >10 days by now.

Regarding MS taking 2nd place - recently came in contact with their cloud.
It's not up to par to the rest from a tech perspective, however, they are
killing it on their sales channels and in sectors such as banks and retail due
to their ubiquity in those.

Edit: Wording, horrible is not the best description of the MS cloud, just not
as good for me.

~~~
partiallypro
Explain, how it is horrible from a tech perspective? (hint: it's not)

Edit: I'm getting downvoted, but no one as of yet has shown how Azure is built
on horrible tech compared to its peers. It's just a flat lie, none of the big
3 are built on horrible tech. It's just being dishonest and is basically
fanboyism/hatred of one party. You can argue about UI you like or don't (I
prefer Azure) you can argue about APIs, their IaaS and SaaS, you can argue
that Azure isn't as good on the "edge" compared to GCS, you can say kubernetes
is a bumpier ride on Azure etc, but saying the tech is "horrible" is not
correct. Sorry. This isn't early 2000s Slashdot.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
The UI is, um, lets say, very unconventional for non-windows folks. It is
extremely sluggish compared to AWS or GCP. As in, each page takes several
seconds+ to fully load vs AWS/GCP. Maybe this is just for me, or an IE vs
Chrome issue or something, I'm not sure. The horizontal panning in the UI is
pretty strange for the uninitiated too. Everyone else, the _entire internet
pretty much_ scrolls up/down on a web page but in Azure it's up/down + side-
to-side + expanding panels with scroll. I'm not even sure where to look for
things (scroll down or to the side). As far as the tech is concerned, I'm not
sure but the first impression of the UI coming from another cloud provider
just seems off. Typically, I use the UI to get the lay of the land before
hitting the API or something. But, I suspect I'm not the target market since
I've spent my entire career on the linux side of things.

~~~
mmcconnell1618
Enterprises tend to automate cloud deployments once they've gotten past the
initial phases. Comparing UI is valid but also compare the Restful APIs, SDKs
and template driven automation tooling across clouds.

~~~
scarface74
You give way too much credit to most enterprise infrastructure guys.

------
tmvnty
I'd like to comment a few things made me appreciate and enjoy Google/Cloud
services and I am aware they are very subjective to my personal experience as
a student and beginner to web dev, but there are many folks like me so I could
be speaking for them too.

Resources, Resources and Resources! As a self-taught web developer, I
struggled a lot when it comes to learning anything about web developments, and
whenever I found some good resources, be articles/guides/tutorials/videos,
they always came back to the Google team. Their sites/content such as the
Google Developers, Web Fundamentals, Firebase/Google Chrome Developers Youtube
channels and so much more, are very beginner friendly and it is all focused on
web developments too. Google Web Fundamentals and MDN are essentially my go-to
recommendations for any web dev beginners.

Meanwhile, AWS and Azure seemed very enterprise-y and aimed at industry
veterans. AWS dashboard and documentation interface daunts me, and while I'm
aware other resource sites such as Udemy, Pluralsight or Front End Masters
have excellent courses on AWS, but I do not find them to be extensive and easy
to learn as Google ones, and they aren't free either. Azure? I think in terms
of good documentation and learning resources, it is definitely in the third
place when compared to Google/AWS.

~~~
Fellshard
Azure's documentation is standard Microsoft technical doc fare, i.e.
atrocious. It's horrible trying to get a straight answer out of anything
they've written.

~~~
sk5t
My impression from a decade in Windows Server and .NET development is exactly
the opposite. You may have to do a lot of reading, but the available technical
docs have 100x the raw utility of those from Apple and others.

------
filleokus
This seems related to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383553)
(Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue), where this point was
discussed almost endlessly:

> These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like
> Office into “cloud revenue.”

~~~
filoleg
And as discussed to death in the linked thread, what Microsoft should've done
instead? Excluded Office from the cloud revenue, simply because Amazon didn't
make as much money from their own office productivity suite (but still
included it in their cloud revenue numbers)?

MSFT used cloud revenue metrics consistent with those of the competitors
(Amazon and Google), which is the proper way to do it, imo.

~~~
wmf
I guess it would be more comparable if they split out IaaS/PaaS/SaaS although
probably no company wants to do that.

------
tyler_larson
I dug into the details earlier this year, and it turned out at the time that
Microsoft counts some undisclosed but significant percentage of revenue from
sales of Office 365 in their "Commercial Cloud" category, even if you buy it
in a box at a store... because in theory that box entitles you to Office In
the Cloud. This (Azure plus some percentage of Office) is the "Azure" revenue
number that gets compared to AWS and GCP to determine the market share number
that you see in all the graphs.

Can anyone confirm/deny? I'm reasonably certain this is right from my reading
of financial reports, but I'm no accountant.

~~~
Bucephalus355
This is very true. There are lots of gamification the providers play to
“juice” the numbers.

Here’s one example (apologies for picking on IBM). So IBM will sell you a
million dollars of software for $1, and then force you to buy $600,000 of
cloud even if you never use it. You don’t complain because you got a 40%
discount, and IBM can “book” 600k in cloud revenue.

------
alienreborn
Google having an edge in ML and kubernetes will help them but they really need
superior documentation to counter crowd wisdom on AWS.

Solutions/answers to most basic roadblocks you might encounter when working
with AWS offerings are a quick google search away but that's the case for gcp
offerings. They also need to ramp up their evangelism (for the lack of better
word) to get some mind share.

------
manigandham
Google has great primitives. But they are very slow in releasing new features,
and what they do provide is only offered in "the google way".

AWS and Azure might not have everything packaged as clean, functional,
scalable components, but instead they look at what companies are using today
and just offer a managed version of it as quickly as possible, with a constant
stream of updates. They apply the iterative process of startups to the cloud,
and this means that actual startups can get going 10x faster.

We run primarily on GCP because almost all of our needs are GKE/VMs, but 100%
of our managed services come from AWS and Azure.

~~~
tdb7893
Anecdotally I've met an absolutely crazy amount of recent Google Cloud hires
in the past few months so I'm curious if the pace of updates will improve in
like a year as they throw money at it.

~~~
thundergolfer
They told me in Grad interviews that a majority of their grad hires are into
Google Cloud right now.

------
awad
Snap and Spotify account for 13.7% of Google Cloud:
[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend-
nearly-45...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend-
nearly-450-million-on-google-cloud-over-3-years.html)

~~~
romed
Snap doesn't spend it all on what you are all discussing here, though. Even
though it's wrapped up in Google Cloud marketing, Snap's main use seems to be
of App Engine, a product that is clearly in the lead among comparable
products, as opposed to things like GCS and GCE which are clearly behind S3
and AWS, respectively.

Snap also has a huge contract with AWS, for what it's worth. Other large
customers like Apple also split their ticket between Amazon and Google.

~~~
wikibob
In what specific way is GCE behind EC2?

I would argue on many points GCE is clearly significantly superior to EC2.

The Google billing model is far better, they bill on straight CPU and Memory,
which you can combine in any desired ratio. Amazon has well over 100 different
instance types.

Google gives you an automatic sustained usage discount. Amazon requires you to
commit to reserved instances up front for 1 year minimum, and those have to be
_specific_ instance types, so as your workloads change you can't reallocate
capacity.

GCE has workload live-migration. If the underlying hardware that your VM is
hosted on begins to fail, they will migrate you to new hardware in REAL TIME
without any downtime other than a sub-second pause in processing.

Amazon will notify you that your hardware is failing and give you a deadline
usually a week or so out to reboot your VM, if you don't they just terminate
it.

I could continue for several more points if interested.

~~~
romed
Market share.

------
samfisher83
Given how customer unfriendly google seems it is not surprising. If you are
running a service and google shuts it down or just closes your account with no
explanation it might be hard for you.

------
daxfohl
How much do you think Active Directory is driving Azure's success? I picture
Azure's big sales pitch as being able to call up GE or Exxon or whatever and
say "hey throw all your ancient lotus notes and other various hosted stuff
onto our servers and we can sync all your AD to AAD and you're done". I can
see that as being a huge thing. And once an enterprise is in, they're start
using it for new things as well.

I've never done any kind of enterprisey user access management before so I
don't know if it's actually that easy or even if it's any different from
migrating to AWS/GCP. Or if AD sucks and enterprises hate it. Would love to
hear from people who have more experience there.

------
twunde
One thing that Azure has really done a good job at is compliance. According to
their latest report there are 13 services that aren't HIPAA-compliant, where
most of their services are. Compared to Google or AWS that's a major jump in
what's usable for companies with compliance needs. That plus their aggression
in converting on-prem customers to the cloud (last I heard they were buying up
datacenters) has helped them become #2 in the cloud space

~~~
briffle
I'm having a hard time finding something in Google cloud that is NOT covered
by their BAA:
[https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...](https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-
products)

~~~
twunde
That lists 38 hipaa-compliant services. Azure's is close to 80ish hipaa-
compliant services. AWS' list is fairly large too. I haven't used GCE in a
long time, so maybe GCE just has that many fewer products/services.

~~~
vel0city
One big selling point of GCP vs other cloud providers in regards to HIPAA is
that pretty much all of GCP is covered, and probably will in the future:

"GCP’s security practices allow us to have a HIPAA BAA covering GCP’s entire
infrastructure, not a set aside portion of our cloud. As a result, you are not
restricted to a specific region which has scalability, operational and
architectural benefits. You can also benefit from multi-regional service
redundancy as well as the ability to use Preemptible VMs to reduce costs.

The security and compliance measures that allow us to support HIPAA compliance
are deeply ingrained in our infrastructure, security design, and products. As
such, we can offer HIPAA regulated customers the same products at the same
pricing that is available to all customers, including sustained use discounts.
Other public clouds charge more money for their HIPAA cloud, we do not."

[https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...](https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-
products)

Its been about a year since I last checked out everything you need to be HIPAA
compliant to run AWS services, but IIRC it required running dedicated
instances for nearly everything. That can make running on AWS way more
expensive.

EDIT: Apparently the limitation of dedicated instances was removed in May
2017. [https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-
compliance/](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/)

~~~
twunde
That's great to know about GCE. It makes moving there actually a possibility

------
innocentoldguy
The last company I worked for used Azure. I had never used Azure before and
the thought of using a Microsoft product was a bit off-putting during my
interview, to be honest (yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school,
Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs from the 1990s). After using it for a few days, I
had a change of heart. The documentation is pretty good and their tech support
guys were extremely helpful. They would even call me back several days after
the fact to make sure their suggestions were working and that I was having a
good experience on the platform. In my experience, their UI made sense, their
documentation was decent, and their tech support was great. I think Microsoft
has earned their spot in the market with Azure.

~~~
wutbrodo
> yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs
> from the 1990s

I don't think this is all that old school. It's not like Microsoft spent the
2000s repairing their reputation. I started my career in the beginning of the
current decade, and the question of whether Microsoft sucked wasn't even an
interesting one, because everyone knew the answer was yes.

It's the last few years that they're really started to turn around their
reputation, as I understand it (though I haven't had exposure to any of their
products in this period).

------
navinsylvester
Would like to cover few points discussed here.

I don't think its fair to judge cloud platforms competency with just the
market share since there are players like Microsoft/Oracle who have lot of
enterprise foothold. I have used all other major cloud providers and as a
power user, have found GCP to be rock solid.

Paid support is the only option with all major cloud platforms if you want
faster response. I think all of them need to get better at it.

Cloud providers can literally break your business with a price hike so be very
careful when you build your stack. Don't tangle yourself by consuming vendor
locked features. Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider
at very short notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in
parallel.

~~~
scarface74
_Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider at very short
notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in parallel._

Changing infrastructure over a small increase in price (which rarely happens)
is a one of those dreams that techies have but hardly ever happens because the
risk of regressions is too high.

The minute you don’t use managed services and you host everything yourself on
EC2 instances you have the worse of all worlds - you’re paying more than
baremetal, you’re paying the same amount for supporting your infrastructure,
and you’re not developing any faster than you could on prem.

~~~
navinsylvester
Depends on your team and product needs.

I don't think price is the main motivation to use cloud. Ease of use, vast
resources to provision without any significant delay and pay for what you use
are the main factors.

If your infra is not mission critical and if you have deep pockets you can
afford to be tied to a vendor. Otherwise - having skilled expertise and
designing your architecture in vendor agnostic way is pretty much essential.

~~~
petra
Does using cloud that more expensive, as a share of revenue, in most
businesses ?

~~~
scarface74
Probably not, but I’ve seen two companies that were in AWS.

The first company where I was the Dev lead and at the time didn’t know the
first thing about AWS and neither did the infrastructure guys and we brought
in consultants. Yes it was much more expensive. We didn’t reduce the number of
people, didn’t increase automation from the netops side and we developed just
like we did on prem. So yeah they should have stuck with the colo and from
what I’ve heard, they kept my system on AWS but stopped there.

On the other hand, I’ve worked for a company that started off on AWS from day
one. They outsourced most of the netops to a Managed Service Provider, they
have one person in house that manages some of the EC2 instances and does some
other projects, and they used as many of the managed service offerings on AWS
as they could. They were more concerned about focusing on their core business
than worrying about the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”.

------
sandGorgon
Azure's UX is terrible. They have this weird sliding, Metro UI that takes a
lot of learning to figure out. Every startup that I have talked to has hated
using Azure. Even the pricing is so hard to figure out. There is some weird
intermediate conversion when looking up the price for managed databases.

Microsoft is known to throw brilliant discounts into bundling cloud along with
its other Office stuff. Not sure if they are using this as leverage.

In India, I know for a fact that the banks that are moving to the cloud are
doing it on Azure, because Microsoft is not afraid of heavy compliances. It's
hard to speak to a human in Google Cloud.

~~~
richardknop
I agree on the UI part, it is quite horrendous. But any major enterprise
organisation should be / probably is using some sort of automation tool such
as Terraform or something similar. You just don't go and click around in the
UI to set up your stuff manually, that's not how big projects in enterprise
work (all cloud stuff is automated without depending on UI) so bad UI is a con
but it's less important that other more technical features.

~~~
sandGorgon
ha ha - fair enough. Pretty much justifies Hashicorp's valuation ;)

But here's some stuff that's really missing. In Google's dashboard (and their
API), you can add ssh keys _after_ creation of an instance. Its a fairly basic
functionality made possible by the "accounts daemon" (which is opensource
[https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-
package...](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-
packages/tree/master/google_compute_engine/accounts))

Azure doesnt have this, etc.

------
mrweasel
There's a large number of companies that have a "Microsoft Strategy", meaning
that if Microsoft have a solution that sort of fits the problem, that's what
they pick.

Google simply can't sell to these customers, because... They aren't Microsoft.

The weird part is that a large number of these companies will outsource their
operations, their own staff will never use Azure services directly. It would
make zero difference if their applications run on Amazons, Googles or
Microsofts cloud offering, but they have a "Microsoft Strategy", so it has to
run on Azure.

------
Blunts
It's astonishing to me that you silicon valley types still don't get, how much
of a lead MS have on the compliance front (among others) that makes their
cloud platform the only logical choice. In Europe, GCP is almost immediately
disregarded, as they have, on multiple occasions, proved they cannot be
trusted with your data, and legally required audits will destroy your company
if you chose google as your provider(see the DeepMind issue for the latest
example) while Amazon doesn't have quite the same problem, contrast that to MS
who has the largest compliance list, as well as outstanding contracts with
most large companies, and the choice is bloody obvious. Essentially, if you
are not a SF startup or American centric company, there really is no other
option, and the vast majority of the human population, surprise surprise, do
not live/work in America.

~~~
matt4077
I'm also in Europe, using GCP, know many others who do, and have actually
never heard criticism of GCP with regard to data security.

Yes, there are lots of people criticising Google. But for a business using
GCP, my impression is that they have been pretty good crossing their t's and
dotting their ö's during, for example, the recent introduction of GDPR. They
have contracts and model clauses for different scenarios and products. And
while I can't judge how good these are, I would assume they will be tested in
court pretty quickly.

Long before that, they have reacted well to criticism. For about a decade or
so, Analytics has had the option to only collect anonymized IP data, a
requirement from a couple of court decisions categorizing IP addresses as PII.

I don't disagree that Google's size alone is reason for scepticism, and to
keep an eye on them. But please don't go around claiming to speak for some
imaginary European consensus when no such thing exists.

~~~
nprateem
Well things like the DeepMind NHS data transfer don't really help[1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/google-
be...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/google-betrays-
patient-trust-deepmind-healthcare-move)

------
markbnj
Microsoft is much better positioned than Google to build a large cloud
business off their enterprise customers. IT execs need a "cloud strategy." MS
can move their existing apps right into Azure. Presto, you have a good story
for the board. Their success in this sphere doesn't surprise me. Google's
cloud business growth is nothing to sneeze at, and I don't know whether it
matters that they are in third place or not.

------
asien
Honestly , they deserve that place.

While I’m a huge G cloud fan , there is too many things that frustrate me with
GCloud.

Whether it’s Firebase that doesn’t have a way to limit user bandwidth or
Google Staff taking you for a dummy because the guy is a « Google Engineer »
or the performance of European Datacenter... there is a just countless stuff
that makes GCloud overall an « okay » experience but nowhere similar to what
AWS or’Azure offers

------
oppositelock
I work in this space. If you count VMWare on-prem deployments, Azure and GCP
are 3rd and 4th, respectively.

Amazon's dominance is massive, Azure exists because Microsoft gives it away
for free with big Windows and Office purchases, and GCP putters along last due
to perceived bad customer service (which is kind of true)

------
PaulHoule
I find Google's products harder to use than competitors.

A year ago I did a shootout between visual recognition APIs by the like of
IBM, Amazon, Azure, Google, Clarifai, etc.

Every API other than Google took less than 20 minutes to get logged in and
running API calls.

To log into Google cloud services I had to install complex proprietary code
just to be able to log in. Then when I installed the Python GCS API it
destroyed my anaconda installation even though I wasn't working in the base
environment.

I was able to get it to work but it took 10x longer than competing APIs.

It seems to be the same way for other GCS services. I think people at Google
think they are so smart that developer ergonomics doesn't matter.

------
mathattack
Google struggles with the top down Enterprise sales required to make something
like this happen at a non-Tech Fortune 500 firm. It’s not about low cost
hardware and fancy AI, it’s about helping move a process along.

------
netwanderer3
Microsoft were able to leverage their Office 365 cloud products that most
companies are already using to gain momentum. Google have shifted their focus
toward AI in their recent years and I believe once it is ready, Google will
come out with a breakthrough AI application on its cloud platform that will
make a lot of businesses flock to them. Right now they just really don't have
a way to differentiate themselves among other providers yet. It's still early
in the game but that time will come.

------
callesgg
GCP is mainly sold to engineers it being the best one on a price per feature,
AWS is sold on market force they where the first big one. Azure is sold on
being a vmware setup replacement.

------
PeterHK
for sure all of them have pros/cons.

i have been using AWS for many years across multiple companies now. Over the
years i got the feeling that the quality has degraded. New services are half-
baked (ES, EKS), some newer API's are overly complicated (VPC peering is
overloaded for cross-account AND internal instead of 2 abstractions on top of
it - why do i need to get confused about all these extra API args which are
not needed for internal VPC peering and have to spend hours to finally
understand it). Overall AWS feels that they got more sales focused.

i just started to get nightmares with Azure recently, luckily i was able to
get rid of almost everything of it (only keyvault remains, since azure does
for now have the best offering for HSM). The UI is absolute terrible from
front-end caching bugs to strange permissions. MS seems to have to invent
their own vocabulary for everything instead of using terminology that most of
the rest of the internet uses (which makes finding things very hard), same
goes for their API's, its almost impossible to use their API's without these
super huge and often buggy libs (try to use REST API auth without a lib...). I
am personally also having a hard time to read their documentation.

I did not had the chance to try GC yet but i want to. I know that google
services sometimes can be a bit complex to start with, but there is good
documentation and reference docs - its usually very easy to just use REST api
if you dont wanna use some heavy libs. We recently moved to k8s (i am loving
it - continues deploying apps with autoscaling and 0 downtime was never that
easy), so as we move more into k8s i hopefully get the chance to try out GC

------
geggam
Why are people comparing GUIS when talking about cloud usage ?

If you are using the cloud and the GUI to spin up resources you are doing it
wrong. Period.

------
Havoc
On a commercial scale sure, but personally gcloud will stay a firm favorite of
mine for one simple reason - an aspect of their free tier:

AWS/Azure seems cool too, but that promise of "you'll always have a custom VPS
you can SSH into forever" is wildly underrated imo.

It's not a money issue, it's more about someone handing you a swiss army knife
and saying keep it.

------
rhexs
Interesting. Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena,
they had a chance to integrate with Red Hat's customer base and lost it to
IBM. I suspect IBM will handily pull into third unless they manage the
acquisition like most of their other acquisitions.

~~~
whoisjuan
> Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena.

Enterprise is not a big deal. It's literally everything when it comes to cloud
infrastructure. You can thrive with SMBs but you will never be able to match
the revenue potential of closing enterprise deals.

The hardcore SaaS sales motto is that if you win the enterprise, you win the
market... That's a very very real statement. You're unlikely to capitalize on
any expanded and growing market if you're just a niche player catering
companies under 10MM ARR. That doesn't mean you can't build a great company
that caters for SMBs, but you just won't be a significant player in the market
(Think Digital Ocean).

You can try to capture all that theoretical mass of small and medium
businesses which in theory looks larger and more profitable when seen as a
block, but you will burn yourself harder and get less return over those deals.
It's simple math. It's better to go after an account that will spend 20MM on
your services (for instance Netflix), than trying to close 200 accounts that
will spend 100K on your services.

The logic here is that by earning the trust and loyalty of the enterprise
clients you can slowly capture the other segments of the market. Not the other
way around.

If Google's plan for their cloud is to focus on SMBs, they will get crushed
even harder and potentially disrupted by niche companies which ironically will
build their own offerings on top of more feature-rich public clouds like AWS
or Azure.

~~~
jpatokal
You're incorrectly conflating "enterprise" with "large" here. For example,
Snap and Apple are very large companies in terms of Cloud spend, but they're
very much _not_ an "enterprise"/Fortune 500 company that moves at the speed of
an arthritic sloth and needs to be sold on the benefits of moving to the
cloud.

~~~
whoisjuan
I'm basing this on the actual technical terminology for classifying business
segments. Snap and Apple are definitely considered Enterprises if we go by the
Garter definitions that represent business segments as cohorts of different IT
needs.

SMB (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses) 0-100 Employees with ARR of $5-$10
million

SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) 100-1000 Employees with ARR of $10 million
to $1 billion.

Large Enterprise Over 1000 employees with ARR of over a $1 billion.

Of course, there are always going to be outliers or companies that can't be
classified exactly in one category because they may have unusual large IT
spendings and Infrastructure needs. That's probably the case for Snap and
Apple, but that doesn't mean they are not enterprises by definition.

As an IaaS, the bulk of your revenue is not coming from Snap anyways. It's
coming from companies with those arthritic speeds you mention and that are
just starting to realize why it makes sense to move their huge workloads to
the cloud.

------
api
The fact that GCP doesn't have IPv6 yet (except for load balancers) is insane.

~~~
ec109685
How does that limit you?

~~~
api
For our application it would make it a lot easier to directly communicate with
phones and other devices on mobile networks among other things. It's a UDP-
based native protocol. Google has UDP load balancers, but they obscure source
IP and other info.

It's also just lame. It's 2018.

------
pier25
AWS may be the better service, but the console is a huge mess.

------
ozten
Bloomberg article lacks comparable data. Seems like an Azure puff piece. Would
have loved to see comparable data across the top 5 players.

------
gandutraveler
Imo. GCP-> Geeks, hackers, beginners . AWS -> Small Businesses, Startups .
Azure-> Large Enterprise Businesses.

------
NotANaN
I wonder how much of the increasing success of Azure is creditable to its deep
integration with Visual Studio Code.

~~~
oaiey
There is no deep integration. Some plugins yes. It is driven by that
motivation. I use VS Code daily and never read the word Azure there.

My opinion on your question: Not much. The interesting question is: How much
the good will (VS Code, .NET Core, Linux support,...) of the last year's pay
out

------
sxp62000
If Godaddy can provide decent support, why can't Google?! The only think I use
on Google Cloud is Firebase, love Firebase. But even then, I never know
who/where to ask if I have questions.

~~~
pier25
I've had my ups and downs with Firebase. The dev experience is generally good,
but reliability hasn't been so great.

Last year we had a 12 hours database downtime. Our call center was hell all
day long. After a number of emails back and forth their support engineers
acknowledged there was a downtime and gave us $25 of credit and an apology
which doesn't even begin to cover our bad image to our customers.

I've had problems with storage dozens of times where files couldn't be
uploaded.

2 weeks ago some cloud functions simply stopped triggering until I redeployed.
Thankfully this was on a dev project and production was not impacted.

We are slowly but steadily moving some projects out of Firebase and will not
start new web projects with it. Maybe it's better with the Swift and Android
SDKs.

------
Aloha
Third place is still a big chunk of the pie.

------
alexnewman
4th place. IBM is beating them.

------
MR4D
I predict they will settle for fourth - after Apple.

Give it 2 years, 4 tops.

~~~
why_only_15
Why do you think that Apple will enter the cloud? Apple hasn't been a real
contender in servers for a decade, and it seems like their strength lies more
in the design than in raw technical capabilities.

~~~
MR4D
iCloud, iWork(web based), email, Time Machine(backup), Messages, Apple Pay.

Those are some of the things that Apple _already does_ in the cloud. I
anticipate it will expand significantly as they grow their services business.

Whether they build a “server” is irrelevant - the “service” however, is key.

