I don't have any knowledge of this, but it sounds to me a lot like a typical everyday re-org or "defragmentation" that happen frequently.
Defragmentation example: they have a team with 12 people in California, 5 in New York, 2 in Seattle and 3 in Zurich. They decide to move all roles into one location instead of having the team split all over. If you don't want to move with the role, then you need to find something new.
Alternatively perhaps they just merged some teams and there were surplus folk. In my experience (unrelated to any of this) in rapidly growing orgs, teams/functions often get duplicated/semi-duplicated as different parts independently spin up teams to deal with some need. Ultimately these end up getting rationalised as time progresses.
If they were doing big layoffs of engineers etc, I think we'd have heard about it o we Twitter/blogs/comments/etc by now
I hope you’re right. My team have chosen Google Cloud. With every news like this one, the risk that Google will shutdown its cloud division seems more and more likely to happen.
> shutdown its cloud division seems more and more likely to happen
That seems extremely unlikely, the products that Google shuts down from time to time are usually not products that make money. GCP is a whole different beast with SLAs, paying customers, huge corporations using it. It also wouldn't make sense to give up the position as one of the few big cloud hosters.
It will start making sense when Google stops shelling out a comparatively-high level of free credits for every new deal. They’re subsidizing their own users to game market share numbers, and at some point the funding to do this will have slow (unless they find out that it actually converts evals to year over year clients).
No. I don't work for Google but that earlier unfortunate piece from the inaptly named "The Information" represents a complete misinterpretation of management-speak and a fundamental misunderstanding of cloud market dynamics.
Google will be in the "cloud" business until the heat death of the universe, but what "cloud" means and where the respective monsters go looking for their next meal and how much capital they put into what kind of hunting is going to continue to change and evolve.
For many businesses that are eg large market-like B2B plays I would be more worried about greedy AWS looking up at me and deciding they would like my position and a larger share of my sweet, sweet revenue stream. Those mofos are apex predators and understand there is no problem that cannot be solved with another API.
These are interesting times, but for commodity cloud consumers there is no future in which Google suddenly decides that with the hundreds of billions of capitalized data center investment it makes sense to "shutdown" its cloud business. This is not Reader.
For that reason alone it seems so silly to me that Google would make this change and cause this headline to occur. Hell like the poor folks rest and vest as the worse case.
Why though? AWS, Azure etc all look much more competent and friendlier to customers, and without Google's history of killing services they don't care for anymore...
> look much more competent and friendlier to customers
How exactly are you measuring "more competent"? Once you pay for support levels you also don't have the problem that Google is a black hole where you don't get any answers like if you are just a free user on Gmail, YouTube,...
It also depends on which services you use, if you are just running everything in Kubernetes and are not locked into proprietary services of any cloud provider it's not that hard to move between clouds. I find it a bit odd to make blanket statements about a company based on some consumer products or Google Reader being killed off years ago.
Azure is not competent or customer friendly at all. I've been using Azure on and off since its very first days and despite me telling every client that they're better off by using AWS or GCP because it will cause their dev teams less headache, and cost them overall a lot less in engineering cost (time spent by their engineers fighting with Azure instead of building a product) there's still every so often a non technical idiot who got sucked off by some Microsoft Partner manager and trapped in this shitshow of inconsistent, slow, buggy and constantly broken cloud services which Microsoft offers.
Not discounting your experience, but we have clients in all three, and our own experience is that Azure support and service is _significantly_ better than AWS and GCP, to the degree that we primarily recommend Azure for that reason.
Here's two reasons:
1. They have I think the most mature manged kubernetes service.
2. They have a managed Airflow offering called Cloud Composer.
If you are just using the basics (VMs, managed SQL, storage), then it probably makes sense to pick primarily based on factors such as price and customer service.
Once you get into more complicated use cases like say big data, distributed systems, or ML, there are important differences between what the cloud providers are offering.
Many theories and opinions . Here is an observation from someone involved with GCP more than many of you (especially more than the WSJ journalists) - These job cuts are not an indication of the health (or lack of it) of GCP division. From the familiarity I got as a partner, it's probably the consolidation of the sales function. Inside Sales Reps (ISRs) being moved to Field Sales Reps (FSRs) and some of the ISRs being asked to find jobs elsewhere because the strategy is to avoid duplication of efforts and close more deals.
I totally agree. Since Thomas Kurian is the new CEO there is a wind of change noticeable if you are familiar with GCP. Every other comment comparing GCP with an arbitrary service or product of Google does not grasp that with GCP Goggle will get more enterprise oriented like Microsoft and SAP.
So the new boss is from Oracle, who hired new managers from SAP and Microsoft, they are hiring like crazy and cutting some old jobs. Looks like they are trying to get rid of internal critics, resistance. Interesting wars
> Google said it is cutting jobs at its cloud-computing unit as part of a reorganization aimed at improving operations at the business that has become more central to parent Alphabet Inc.
> Google on Friday said “a small number of employees” have been notified their roles have been eliminated. Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company.
I don't get it. Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted? I'm thinking they used the good old "your position is being eliminated due to business reasons" excuse to get rid of people they didn't want to keep.
In "defrags" like this, Google does not lay off people outright, it just tells them their job is going away and they have X months to find a new one within Google -- and they usually do.
I've personally been through this twice at Google. The company definitely provides a very attentive set of resources to help you find a new position within the company, but I've always been able to find a new project on my own.
That said, the more flexibility you have the easier it is to find a new position. This naturally favors some people over others.
In my most recent case, it ended up being a bit more challenging due to having to balance the constraints of family life versus the opportunities availed by an extremely arduous commute, but I ended up finding a project I enjoy that works with my commute constraints.
So... Like... What do you do in the interim? Not work, look for teams, and still get paid a shit ton of money? Do you do some training on the side? Work on a side project? How long does it take to find the new team?
From the couple people I know who have done this, I think it's pretty choose-your-own-adventure... Get paid to look for your new job, with very few actual responsibilities.
It's worthwhile to compare this relative downtime to ramp-up time for new hires... who also generally spend a couple-few months being fairly useless (though working hard at it).
And googlers being googlers, there's a decent chance that the 'down' time turns into interesting learning or side project time.
Lots of networking over coffee. You don't just blindly apply on the internal job board. You talk to people you know in other parts of the company, you schedule meetings with managers with open roles. You reflect on what you actually want to do next. You reach out to mentors on if they know anyone who has interesting open roles or just on advice for next steps.
Also interviewing with other companies. The next best job for you may not be with Google even if you could easily get an internal transfer role. And teams don't just blindly accept you because you already work at Google (although it helps). You still have to go through a somewhat more informal interview loop that you will definitely want to prepare for.
Of course this is up to the individual, you can definitely just screw around for awhile and apply for an interal role with much less care.
Entirely dependent on the team and hiring manager. And the technical requirements of the role you want to move into versus your prior role. If you want to move from working on gmail to working on the android kernel, I imagine there's gonna be some whiteboarding. (Not that gmail is simple software, but just picked two examples that came to mind with different domain expertise).
Sounds reasonable. I was referring more to the gatekeeping type, like a heavy focus on things like balancing trees and recursion for roles that clearly involve neither trees nor recursion.
It's really not that at level. Once at Google you really get the benefit of doubt of clearing a high bar. It's mostly a talk around your work / perf / CLs and then team fit.
If it's anything like amazon they will just be able to look at all of your code for the last N years which is a very strong signal to go along with interview questions. For internal transfers I general focus more on design questions and check the code history for "can they code IRL". Design is harder to check for and also is more dependent on "can we work together to solve problems" which isn't always apparent from just artifacts.
Shrug recursion, where it makes sense, is wonderful and fun. I’m always happy when I find a problem where it makes sense, because those tend to be interesting problems. But in a lot of roles, working in languages like Python and Java, it just isn’t the best option very often.
@ericd, what programming roles don't deal with trees or recursion?
I've dealt with trees in every single domain I've been in, frontend or backend, whether doing "real" programming or building with no-code tools like FileMaker. I've seen admins and accountants build trees and recursion with spreadsheets. I don't think these things are as "gatekeeping" as you imagine.
They're both occasionally the best tool for the job, but I think they're hugely overrepresented in that type of interview. I haven't found that they come up very often in most web development, as an example, but they definitely come up in interviews for web developers.
Since all programming jobs deal with trees and recursion, and if you are already at Google working on another team, wouldn't it mean you already know about those (since our assumption being all jobs deal with those)? Why not just check directly if you were actually useful instead?
It's 100% not true that all programming jobs deal with trees. I worked for years on a major audio/video/screensharing communications SaaS product and never once needed to write recursive code or use a tree structure. Not all code is for processing data. There was tons of code that had very little to do with data structures or algorithms, and much more to do with implementing network protocols, business logic, managing state, abstracting the differences between the various operating systems we had to support, etc...
I don't think people understand that when you work at scale, efficient data structures and algorithms actually matter. I doubt there are many positions in Google that don't fundamentally require the ability to understand both.
Totally depends. My team has specific domain expertise requirements so I interview transfer candidates in addition to speaking to their manager, reading their prior performance reviews, and speaking to them more casually.
There are other teams where there is little need for more formal process.
After a recent merger at my employer, had some people in of the teams at my office with very little responsibilities for most of a year. The first six months they had minimal work because the company hadn't told them yet they were dropping them for a competing team on the other side of the merger, then they did inform them and gave them 3 months to find a new role in the company and apart from the odd production incident on their system, there was basically no work incoming to their former team.
I think 3-4 moved within the company, 3 left on their own time before the deadline, and 4 waited out for the redundancy payment.
Not really. It was pretty stressful for me last time since I needed to find a project whose commute allowed to get home in time to take care of my kids, since my spouse's job has no flexibility in that regard.
When I saw this at Google, the employee had 60-90 paid days to find something new within the company. Some people waited til the last few weeks to find something because they essentially got two months paid vacation.
I took a vacation to Tokyo on a whim when I heard about my defrag. Checked out Google Tokyo (just have to find a Googler near the tower in Rappongi willing to take you up where your badge can matter) and enjoyed another month or so of relaxation back here before starting a new job at a different company. In my case, they were paying a multiplier of my salary due to the circumstances of my "defrag". In all I was paid an entire years salary in one quarter while I enjoyed a sabbatical.
This is a very smart tactic that also, as a side effect, brings the average quality across all engineers at the company up. Smart people with desirable skills would have no problem finding another team within Google to transfer to, while bottom tier performers won’t, thus leaving Google.
On the other side, the company can create a nice "market" by tuning it correctly. When I was at Intel, it was relatively easy to get an internal hiring req, and relatively difficult to get an external one. And... the total number of internal hiring reqs was allowed to over-subscribe the total authorized head count. Coupled with a rule that no manager could block an internal transfer for more than a couple of weeks of clean-up, the net effect was that there was a certain amount of "hole flow", and you could always identify a bad manager by the vacuum that surrounded them. Overall, I thought that was brilliant.
As to people on re-deployment, it did happen that poor performers had a hard time landing a new role -- but then again, they would have had a hard time staying in the company in their old role, so that kind of fits your point. But Intel didn't use redeployment as a "shadow RIF". Intel was not shy about moving people out of the company -- they didn't need to nor bother to hide it.
Back to redeployment -- I can remember occasions of fairly large redeployments (business unit shutting down) where those of us in parts of the company considered more strategic would find ourselves suddenly rich in hiring reqs. Again, the company created the right market conditions and let the hiring managers and employees sort it out.
Unless their skillset just isn't needed at that location anymore and they can't move to a different city for example because they have children in school.
I guess it helps keeping the workforce young and flexible.
A vast majority of full time Googlers are bucketed onto ladders that are needed in pretty much any team. Say SWE, SRE-SWE (that can switch to SWE at will), TPGM, all kinds of managers. Much of the remainder are people who should be able to do the switch, say SRE-SWE to SWE, within the grace period. Legal and accounting might find themselves in a pickle, but these don't move often.
It'd be interesting to study. My intuition is that over the long term it'd cut in the opposite direction--smart people will move on while bottom tier will linger as long as possible.
In my experience the best leave at the first redeployment. Each subsequent buyout the smarter ones leave, it's rarely the crap people that take a buyout or leave altogether.
> Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted?
The third sentence in the article: "Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company."
I hate to be that guy, but I want to point out that more people not always equate to more output. E.g. if you create a "controller" role, they would try to justify their existence and create more work/overhead for others.
And you would be surprised how many roles in big bureaucracies are "controller" roles by nature.
In the third world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up doing nothing but their own things. It's bad but it's obvious that something is going wrong.
In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports.
It's hard for a person to believe a 100-man busy project actually only needs 5 men.
> In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports.
This is such utter nonsense that it's hard to believe you've worked in any human organization.
People in the first and third world are not different species. A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all.
smt88's post was downvoted because it completely misunderstood the point of namelosw's post. smt88 wrote "A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all." Well, in my reading of it, that was exactly namelosw's point. That is, the social pressure in first world countries, and the fact that so many have their identity tied up in their job, demands everyone looks 'busy' even when they are not really doing anything of value.
I made no generalizations. I did exactly the opposite: I pointed out that there are many exceptions to the 1st/3rd world generalizations, rendering them false.
It also appears to originate from Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."
I first heard it from Fred Brooks in Mythical Man Month. But it's even funnier if it came from Theodore von Karman. A lot of HNers will know him from KSP as the namesake of the Karman line, the boundary between atmosphere and space, typically set at 100km above mean sea level.
Even then they are "working" independently. It's not a pipeline that passes the baby from one to the next. That's just plain parallelism. Either way it would do nothing to latency and so would not get the current one done any sooner.
If you implement QBPUs (Quantum Baby Processing Units), you could theoretically produce infinite babies. Of course, we're perpetually 10 years away from working QBPUs.
Most companies have more things they want to do then they can do in the next 6 months. So if you increase throughput without latency, you can still get more of those projects done. Even if you're still doing them all inefficiently.
It's ugly, but "don't hire more people because we'll be less efficient" often runs into this ugly "but we need more total output, not more efficiency" wall.
Why would they publicize it this way though. It seems like it would be easy enough to reallocate these folks in a staged manner without creating a news story out of it.
It's a for profit company with a fiduciary responsibility to share holders. There is zero reason to find jobs for people regardless of the cash position.
1. Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world, and Google spends a considerable amount of resources hiring them. It seems foolish not to keep them on the bench a bit, unless Google foresees that it will be shrinking soon.
2. The people not laid off will very much notice their colleagues being zapped the moment they're not needed. They will rationally tilt towards leaving as well, if they get any whiff that they might be next. It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
> Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world
That ended about 7 years ago when Google decided to expand as rapidly as possible. Alphabet employees over 100k people now. It’s just a younger IBM at this point. There will be thousands of people that will suck and should be laid off rather than kept.
I think you still need to be at the very top of your field to get past that famous interview. It’s completely out of reach for all but the most elite engineers even if they’re already doing brilliantly somewhere else.
Google would like their engineers to believe that, I'm sure, but I doubt it. A large company is just incompatible with the idea of being elite. "Regression to the mean" says that as Google adds engineers they will more closely resemble the general population of engineers.
That’s completely false. The skills to get through the “famous interview” aren’t related to software engineering practices at all. Let that sink in.
Their interview process is loaded with false negative and false positive rates, despite what they claim. If you don’t think they have false positives, just look at the poor quality of so many google products.
An interview process that an algorithms/data structure obsessed senior in college can easily pass is clearly not related to elite engineers. It’s sad that people have been tricked into thinking otherwise.
> If you don’t think they have false positives, just look at the poor quality of so many google products.
I don't disagree with the point you're making, but that's a bad argument. Good engineers are capable of building a bad product if the conditions are right.
The article is about VPs getting a forced sabbatical after a reorg. No one changes their business tactics due to jokes on a TV show. It's totally normal and nothing anyone is moving a way from.
It has nothing to do with rank and file people getting laid off.
It's extremely rare, but there's nothing that makes my job satisfaction drop more than having someone incompetent (in no way related to experience) on the team, or being lead by someone incompetent.
I come to work to get cool stuff done, and sometimes people just don't fit with that goal.
These thoughts are in no way related to the topic.
It’s not only about incompetence, it’s about letting someone go who did their job very well, but are no longer needed and keeping them around anyway.
The story is legendary about all of the infrastructure guys that were let go at Netflix whose job was to migrate them to AWS.
Is that a bad thing? Can you imagine the opportunities you could have if you said that you were instrumental in the largest cloud migration in history?
I can’t remember her name but there was a top ranking official at Netflix hired by Hastings personally. She was instrumental in helping Netflix in the DVD era. But she knew she was going to be laid off when they started focusing on streaming because that wasn’t her area of expertise. She went in and got “quit fired”. She said there were no hard feelings.
I first heard about this with an interview she did on the Internet History Podcast.
My brother-in-law works with various Netflix managers. One of them got a negative mark on her performance review for not firing enough of her team members over the previous 12 months. Netflix pays about 20% over market value, but it's like Lord of the Flies over there.
The difference is the timescale. Netflix won’t let you cruise doing nothing for 3 months while you troll an internal job board begging people to take you.
> It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
I think it's better to have a good exit strategy, such as another job offer, then get laid off. If you get laid off at a big company, there is usually a severance package.
How much does it cost to find and hire a Google-tier worker? Many hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you're talking about financial duty surely their duty is to retain the elite workers they've already got.
Also googlers are sometimes useless outside the Plex. Because of their tendency to religiously reproduce processes that they know so well. And tendency of these processes not to work outside.
Given the market’s performance over the last 4 years, it’s most certainly cheaper to fire people who aren’t actively involved in any projects so Google gets the unvested stock back and then hire fresh at current stock price.
Someone who was hired 2 years ago with 500k of stock vesting over 4 years could have enough unvested stock leftover to fund two employees RSU grants...
Hiring google employees is still cheaper than keeping the senior ones.
I don't work for Google, but I think you're making bold assumptions about how much a year or two of domain knowledge is worth to Google compared to a couple hundred k of stock.
If these employees are transitioning to wildly different roles within the company maybe the math changes a bit, but I'm not sure how much.
Edit: not to mention the trust erosion aspect. If I see people getting laid off cause their stock has appreciated, am I going to stay? Basically means stock appreciation is capped. People wouldn't take kindly to that.
> don't work for Google, but I think you're making bold assumptions about how much a year or two of domain knowledge is worth to Google compared to a couple hundred k of stock.
I did. Google is so large the vast majority of engineers contain domain knowledge that is mainly just useful to their group. And if their group is undergoing layoffs, their domain knowledge isn’t too useful.
About the only useful things that a long-time googler will know when joining a new group over a noogler is the test infra and code review process.
Why would Google even take the risk of this PR, vs. just moving these people into R&D inside the Cloud group? I feel like this clickbait headline will frighten markets more than the bloated headcount expense.
Amazon doesn't have a reputation for shutting down projects, and no one has any reason to doubt Amazon's long term ability to execute on a cloud platform.
Nothing is happening to Google Cloud overall. This is just a small org where two teams were doing similar stuff, so they got merged. This made a few roles redundant, so those folks will be looking for new roles within Google (Cloud). How this made for a WSJ headline, IDK. I couldn't read the whole article because paywall, but the first few lines do mention that it's a tiny number of employees affected and they can look for new roles.
Note: I'm not authorized to speak for Google, but hopefully this addresses some of the panic in this comment thread.
“This morning I learned that my role at Google has been eliminated. If you've got an opening for someone who's in Kubernetes and containers security, focuses on content, advocacy, and communication, and has an OSS background, holler!”
They cut a marketing/outreach team. Maybe they want to focus more on product
development or different marketing and that person wants their same marketing/outreach gig.
I think I figured it out. It was announced in the earnings call. So my guess it was a signal to investors that they are stream-ling Google Cloud for some reason. I am not sure why that is a specific concern except to say they are competitive to investors. My guess is that Azure and AWS loom in investors minds for some reason.
If it costs $10bn a year to run that would mean it represents a $1.1bn loss, and it should be killed if Google can't turn it around. Revenue is a terrible metric to judge something on.
Investing (at a loss) many years to grow a business where you are starting behind others seems sensible. Let's not forget that Amazon had reported almost no profit or just loss for more than a decade. So as long as the business grows it seems like things are moving in the right direction.
All cloud providers charge several times what the underlying hardware/electricity/peering is actually costing then. If the goal is to become immediately profitable rather than continue growing, then just stop reinvesting money into the business in the form of hiring and new data center construction.
Do you have any evidence to believe Google Cloud Platform is negative gross profit?
My background in the industry would lead me to believe GCP (just the infrastructure, not the applications) is 70%+ gross margin with the hardware (and data center) cost (depreciation if capitalized) above the gross margin line.
For a business at that growth rate running a GAAP negative net income is easy to do while still building a high quality profitable long term business.
I’ve made no statements either way. I was responding to the relatively naive idea that increasing revenue without profit was a measure of “success”.
But, cloud companies don’t just have to worry about hardware and infrastructure. They also have to worry about software engineers, “enterprise sales solution architects” and a whole host of other costs.
There's a difference between selling something with a fixed cost (and a fixed value) for a fixed price and selling something which has unknown (and variable) value for a fixed price.
Can someone with an MBA or a business understanding explain why they would even make this announcement if it is a small number of roles in the company? Why not just reorganize? I don’t get it unless it’s a signal to the market that the execs are looking at cloud compute.
This is correct. In many jurisdictions, when a certain number of employees are laid off in a given amount of time, they are required to disclose this to the government.
no, you've been at companies that had reorgs that didn't get picked up by the press. They still had to disclose them to the labor department if they were large enough in states that have reporting requirements for those events.
Why? It probably has to do with the two most recent acquisitions, Looker and Appsheet. They both go into GCP and I bet there's a bunch of folks there working on Data Studio and whatever equivalent of Appsheet they had before that need to find themselves a new job. I don't understand the negativity about this non-news.
Will this ever happen to Amazon (AWS) which is in hiring spree ? when you have surplus, can't they easily cut loose some when plans didn't go the way it was supposed to.
Amazon does this kind of thing all the time. It's very rare with engineers--they just get moved around. But if you have some reorg, you don't need two sets of marketing folks.
They are increasing investment and are arguably the first "cloud" computing company to exist and offer a product to the public.
They might not catch up to the others but it'll still be a highly profitable product suite. I don't see what there is to worry about. GCP also includes Google Maps and GSuite by the way, which have lots of customers.
Considering all the things Google has done in the past year to hurt customer confidence in GCP, this one isn’t that bad at all.
I definitely couldn’t keep myself from wondering what kind of people run their PR, when they released a post late last year, saying that unless GCP hits the financial target $X by 2023, its funding will be noticeably cut. That was literally a release of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the wild.
As a google cloud customer, the feature request backlog is long, almost everything useful is in Beta and doesn't have an SLA, and the Support is _absolutely useless_.
They still have us by the balls as a customer, because some companies just will not allow you to put their data in AWS...and mostly in places where Azure is still a poor alternative (I'm looking at you, Central Germany).
I'm going to make an outrageous prediction: due to the changing geopolitical landscape which has been going on since 9/11, loss of trust in the US as a "leader" that can keep the data safe, we will move away from the cloud and back to a model where data sovereignty trumps all else.
This will be enabled by changes to the underlying infrastructure - moving away from BGP and adopting (BGP backward compatible) protocols like SCION[1], as currently implemented by Swiss carriers, which allow improved traffic shaping, and more importantly: jurisdictional geo-fencing.
We'll also see more legislation by the EU to level the playing field against US companies who currently do business with a Double Irish Dutch sandwich.
The current model where the US is the only cloud provider with virtually no EU based competitor and where EU data is locked into US corps is unsustainable. Europeans trust into US companies has never been strong to begin with and current politics (+horrible foreign policy) will reduce it further.
The cloud is dead imo. Because in a climate where national interests are suddenly more important than partnerships and international trade, the cloud is more of a risk than anything else. The US makes that same case too, illustrated by their hostility towards Chinese products (I'm not defending China here at all btw).
edit: I have to dig up this quote again from Aral Balkan's recent talk at the EU parliament: "You are acting as an unpaid Research and Development department for silicon valley. Because if a startup here succeeds, it gets bought by Google or Facebook. If it fails, we pick up the bill.": https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/861c07f7-7e9b-4e64-9765-c...
In the whole chain, not very many people care that much. Maintaining data centers requires expertise and many years of commitment and is simply more expensive at any scale unless you are extremely cautious and predictable.
Maintain your own data centers and they become cost centers, with silly games for getting and maintaining capacity, reluctance to expand capacity, and old technology.
A few people will talk loudly about it but not much will actually get done because the people who have experience with the cloud providers and the alternatives won't have any interest in moving back for vague ideals or vague threats.
The only thing most anybody cares about is their cloud providers directly competing with the customer's business model (most notably Amazon).
A more real threat reaction is jurisdictions going after the big five or so for antitrust issues and trying to break a few of them apart.
Amazon or any of them don't care about national interests any more than they have to and they'll do whatever they need to to calm fears (more or less just strengthening the legal regional isolation as necessary).
I think there will also be an enormous drop in revenue once the next recession comes. A lot of loss-making companies, aiming to grow as fast as possible using VC money, use cloud providers because it's one less thing they have to learn how to do. If they have an actual business model, like Dropbox, they eventually self-host. If they don't, and didn't really expect to have to develop a business model other than "grow really big", then once the VC spigot gets turned off they will shut down.
It is much like the late 90's boom, when a lot of companies were selling banner ads to each other. Even the ones who appeared to be profitable weren't really, because all of their customers were not. Once the loss-making customers of cloud companies go away, the big three cloud companies may find that they don't have a business model either.
Dropbox is a poor example to generalize from, since in a very real sense they're a cloud provider. They make bank directly on server administration, so cheaper servers translate directly to the bottom line. They would have to be incredibly foolish not to in-house this at some point.
Most SaaS etc. businesses make money in a way that is indirectly related to their server costs. Bringing the cost of servers down increases margin ceteris paribus, but the Latin is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
It's not at all clear to me that the median AWS customer can save money by going self-hosting. If I had to bet money on it, I'd bet against it.
Cloud and Energy have similar economics. No economic entity I know of operates their own power plant and power distribution network in their backyard. No economic entity should be expected to operate their own datacenters and data networks. The Cloud is here to stay, just as Energy utilities are here to stay. What EU needs to do is to recognize the strategic importance of the Cloud, invest in EU Cloud infrastructure and ban American/Chinese companies from running EU Cloud datacenters. Then pray latency costs are sufficient to keep EU companies from moving their data overseas.
I really have no skin in this game one way or another. I don't work with cloud companies, I don't make money with non-cloud things either. And I don't give a toot about how this unfolds because I think all things that Tech brings forward these days are bad for humans and society. So whether it's the cloud or ActivityPub or motherfuckers who believe the blockchain will cure the worlds ills ... the only thing that is on my mind is making it until spring, so that I can fuck off again into the woods for a couple of months and not think about it.
But go on with your vague insults if it eases your own personal suffering.
OP prefaced by saying "outrageous prediction" - admitting plainly its pure speculation. If s/he didn't do that, that would be something that deserves to be called out.
While I am not a fan of the closing sentence of this comment, the steps and flow are something I observe regularly today (in person and online). Is there a phrase for this type of information transformation?
Even in your example it wouldn’t mean the cloud is dead, the big US cloud companies would suffer as smaller country and region specific cloud providers thrive.
yeah what I meant wasn't that any of the providers we see today will disappear, but the model under which they are forced to operate will look completely different. I'm not suggesting that Amazon/Google will be kicked out of Europe that would be silly. But they would be forced to a) pay their taxes, and b) implement guarantees that a packet will never leave a certain jurisdiction. This is so different to how cloud works today that you might as well call the cloud dead.
What most of us who work for BigTech don't see, and I mean Big as in massive traffic and where throughput/latency is a competitive advantage, is that this advantage isn't that important to businesses not operating in that market. For them the benefits far outweigh the risks posed by putting their data up into leaky S3 buckets. And if it's not leaky buckets, it's the potential of a nation-state "alley" that abuses that trust. Even big companies like Airbus, Daimler or BASF (a few random players as an example) don't actually need the advantages that we (who want to roll out apps to an international audience) would think are crucial to dominate a market.
> Tired of its businesses turning to foreign cloud-computing providers such as the Google, Microsoft and Amazon, the German government is leading the push for a European cloud network called Gaia-X. France is also on board. “Data will be the most important raw material of the future,” said German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier in a statement this week. “The European economy urgently needs an infrastructure that ensures data sovereignty.”
> Just like their American counterparts, more than half of European businesses with over 1,000 employees now use a public cloud platform. But European governments aren't so sure that they should trust their data on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud, or the IBM Cloud. They worry that the US CLOUD act enables US law enforcement to unilaterally demand access to EU citizens' cloud data -- even when it's stored outside the States.
> Germany and France are introducing a government-backed project to develop European cloud infrastructure in an effort to help local providers compete with U.S. technology giants, which dominate the global cloud market.
> However, if you dig deeper, you’ll find that a growing number of organizations have public cloud buyer’s remorse. A recent VotE Organizational Dynamics 2017 survey found more than one-third of companies surveyed migrated data from public to private clouds in 2017. Forrester Research shows migration to hosted private clouds are on the upswing, with adoption rising from 28% to 33% in North America in Europe. In that same survey, 36% of cloud adopters and planners state hosted private cloud is – or will be – their primary computing platform.
> Out of 400 IT decision makers who participated in the survey, more than 80% of them agreed that their organization either migrated applications or data that were primarily on public cloud environment to on-premises data centers or private cloud solutions in the past 14 months.
Do you think SAP will come up with a cloud provider to compete with aws and the like? I don't know if there is another European software company big enough for that.
In my opinion, the issue for European "cloud" service isn't so much the infrastructure. There are already fairly large hosting companies like OVH, Hetzner…
But on the software side it's lacking. And suggesting SAP might bridge the gap for software quality would get a laugh from anyone who regularly uses their product.
My feeling about european cloud providers (OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, Irideos) is that their main fault is not approaching their business like AWS does.
In the sense of being customer centric, offering thorough services, standardizing and operating on thin margins in order to reinvest most of their profits into the company itself.
A lot of small players in the cloud fields either offer an incomplete set of services, or adopt hardly-scalable models of operations.
If you want to at least have a chance of winning european customers concerned with data privacy and stuff from AWS you should try to replicate their pros -- offer a compelling alternative.
Not to disagree about the quality of SAP's product but realistically if not for us based cloud providers they're going to be stuck with Yandex cloud or Baidu.
They tried before with SAP Cloud Platform (that was the last name it settled after changing from SAP HANA Cloud Platform and other myriads).
They decided to back off from being a cloud provider. They got no skin (top-level don't know how to pull it off) nor skill (EU engineers aren't the best in hi-tech) in the game.
Last I saw they only tried to build a shim-layer on top of CloudFoundry to orchestrate infrastructure running on other cloud vendors.
They got zero clients for SAP Cloud Platform since their customers prefer "best of breed" (AWS/Azure). If they say they have customers, it'll be "internal" customers: SAP other divisions who used them and they charged those divisions (that's how SAP works).
Telco operators could, that also already have network capabilities too. At least in Italy they actively try to. They are definitely inefficient, so I’ve not seen any actual result, but in some other country they could succeed.
Populism is in the air. Don't bet that tech innovation is the antidote. WWII taught us that technology and liberalism are mutually independent. In SV, technology and liberalism happen to coincide, but they don't have to.
> Populism is in the air. Don't bet that tech innovation is the antidote.
I strongly agree with this. But there is a response to everything and companies don't operate in a vacuum. I'm not suggesting that SCION is our version of "let's build a wall and make Americans pay for it".
Apart from protecting regional interests (which is just 1), SCION has too many advantages that let operators/carriers monetize on, to be ignored.
I completely agree with you. EU trust into US companies is all time low between technical personal and not without a reason, companies like google and facebook has made USA look really bad, even more with their ignorance to GDPR which is a huge thing in EU. All countries have some bad connection and history ties to some dictatorship that was collecting data to remove the oposition, from Stasi, UDBA, Securitate not to mention Gestapo that gave data collection bad taste for future generations that are learning this in primary school. USA didnt have ww2 on their soil. Hoower is probably their only connection to massive survailance and even that one was limited. People there just dont get it that privacy in EU is not the same thing as in USA, we had massive killings and torture due to lack of it. Europe remebers it and FB and Google are poking into one open wound they shouldnt. To have Crypto AG connection with CIA in national news is something that never happened before (highly specialized hitech themes is typically not submitted to general public). And then Facebook got kicked due to trying to smuggle something forbidden (this is perception of average cityzen) You couldnt wish for worse publicity for their service. And USA is always tied to this.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by 2023, said people with knowledge of the matter.
Snapchat was (is?) built on AppEngine and they signed a 5 year 3 billion dollar contract with GCP. I wouldn't be surprised if AppEngine is hanging by a thread outside of a few large users as GCP devs have on multiple occasions signaled new projects with the intention of replacing AppEngine (I forget which ones, feel free to verify that anecdote yourself).
AppEngine is just one product in Google Cloud, and the first they released in 2008. Of course there will be new versions and eventually new products that are recommended like VMs, GKE, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and more.
It's still supported and has plenty of usage so I don't see it as "hanging by a thread" unless you have more data than things that people said but apparently you forgot?
So what? I can give you a point-by-point rebuttal of everything on that page.
> The standalone legacy SDK and appcfg tooling
Just use the newer `gcloud` command-line tool.
> Go 1.9 (GA) and Node.js 8 (GA)
Upgrade your language man. This is PaaS. You're expected to keep your app up to date.
> Admin API v1beta4/v1beta5
These are beta versions of the API. Why don't use migrate to the GA versions?
Etc, etc. In fact the large number of deprecations on that page only shows how rapidly new features and runtimes and frameworks are being developed to replace old ones.
While AWS has deprecated runtimes, if you have an old running version of Node for instance on lambda, it will run forever. It will force you to upgrade to a newer version the next time you update the lambda.
As far as I know, AWS has never discontinued a service or turned off an API. They may deprecate a feature or make it unavailable for new accounts or regions.
Heck AWS still supports running an EC2 instance outside of a VPC if your account is old enough,SimpleDB , and using S3 as a BitTorrent seed for old regions.
Optimizing for growth requires forgoing profit, which is the model in place for GCP (and what everyone seems concerned over) so I don’t see what the problem is.
Is it really that you just don’t feel they’re committed enough for your standards?
Like I said, it's double-digit billions product line and has a 10+ year history. And internal metrics show lots of profit margin comparable to AWS, although you'll have to find someone to share that with you in person.
Not to mention that Google is so full of “smart people” (tm) that their sales force is made up of people who probably would never stoop low enough to do lift and shifts as phase 1. They would probably want you to move everything to k8s and rewrite your entire stack.
As opposed to MS. If a business has a legacy app that requires a 10 year old version of Sql Server running on a 12 year old version of Windows, they will put that in Azure and probably offer extended support for the OS for free.
They push you to use a Beta feature as it's the "preferred" way of interacting with their internal APIs. Meanwhile they know definitively that there's a race condition in their code when using this feature that will _take down the entire service_. It took down our entire Production project, they weren't forthcoming with any information to get us a fix for several hours (until we started sending nasty escalation emails about our P1 ticket not being handled) and then they blamed us for using a feature that was still in Beta.
We'd had literal face to face meetings where they'd told us we need to use this feature.
Interestingly enough, we were assigned new reps this week. I wonder if our AM and TAM were laid off.
Worked at a company that signed a contract with Dyn. Oracle asked to try to sell us additional services so we said sure why not.
Oracle flew 23 people across the entire country, all in expensive suits, to sit in a conference room for a full 10 hour pitch meeting where only 2 people talked.
And isn’t that the pitch of every startup? We are worth $billions because the size of the market is $billions x 10 if we only capture $a_small_percentage.
It's hard to believe cloud won't be profitable. You are selling one of the world's greatest engines of innovation (computing) using a proven delivery model (internet services). Combine that with very low execution risk, since big tech has been self-consuming computing as a service over 20 years of growth. It would almost be irresponsible to leave this opportunity on the table. If Google lands in third place $a_small_percentage is actually quite large.
That didn’t work out very well seeing they are still paying Apple a reported $8 - $12 billion a year to be the default search engine and it came out in the Oracle trial that they only made $23 billion in profit off of Android from its inception until the beginning of the trial.
Apple makes more from Google in mobile than Google makes from Android.
Google's Android operating system has generated revenue of about $31 billion and profit of $22 billion since its release, an Oracle Corp lawyer told a U.S. court hearing the software company's copyright lawsuit against Google.
Defragmentation example: they have a team with 12 people in California, 5 in New York, 2 in Seattle and 3 in Zurich. They decide to move all roles into one location instead of having the team split all over. If you don't want to move with the role, then you need to find something new.
Alternatively perhaps they just merged some teams and there were surplus folk. In my experience (unrelated to any of this) in rapidly growing orgs, teams/functions often get duplicated/semi-duplicated as different parts independently spin up teams to deal with some need. Ultimately these end up getting rationalised as time progresses.
If they were doing big layoffs of engineers etc, I think we'd have heard about it o we Twitter/blogs/comments/etc by now