Here are the author's examples:
>McDonalds and Burger King
McDonald's is far larger than BK. Also Wendy's is larger than BK according to this source: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/qsr50-2017-top-50-chart
>GM and Ford
Another non-example. We just gonna pretend toyota doesn't exist?
>Nike and Reebok
Again, wtf? Even when reebok stood alone, there was still Adidas in the picture. Not a duality
These examples were picked in the early 1990s, and are specific to the US market. Things change.
For example the US car market has long been largely dominated by GM and Ford with Toyota only recently breaking that (and VW is non-existent). GM and Ford are still the two largest manufacturers: https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufact...
The point is that there is usually very few dominating brands in a market, with the top 2 (approximately) yielding the power and the others following and filling the gaps.
Sure there should be charity in reading but the default assumption is not that your examples are 26 years old. Many people here were either children or not even born yet.
You apparently haven't followed at all or made any effort. Quite extraordinary to see that on HN.
...like whether that claim is well founded or not.
The worst mistake we engineers tend to make is to dismiss the 'wisdom' of professional marketers and branding experts...
Especially in the cloud market, I see rather more players in the future as the underlying technologies become commercially available or even commodity.
In the other side customers value support and services, which does not scale well, and smaller players have an advantage.
If I was starting a startup today, I’d choose Google Cloud. They’re a bit cheaper than AWS, they have all the big types of cloud services you need, and they tend to be more simple/plug-and-play than AWS, requiring less Ops expertise to manage. GKE is awesome, Big Query is easier to manage than Redshift, PubSub easier to both manage and use than Kinesis, if you ever want a truly global database Google has that while AWS doesn’t, etc. AWS has a larger product catalogue, and is more configurable for big enterprises with huge Ops/security teams, but for a startup that has mostly dev and little Ops expertise, I’d choose Google Cloud.
The '22-laws-of-marketing' are not 'laws' - they're just called that by profs trying to hustle a book.
It's a great book that everyone, especially Engineers should read, but it's not necessarily factual.
There can be many 'leaders' it depends on the industry.
Google is no slouch, they have a differentiated offer that may appeal to different kinds of orgs, particularly startups.
To your own point: 'developer friendly' ... Google may be a choice for devs building 'cloud first' solutions, and the primary basis for could based companies. Remember that AWS and Azure have a lot of customers just porting over old-school software onto cloud instances. They need virtual instances in quantity and classic, straight forward easy ways to manage them. Not fancy new cloud gear.
Cloud is big, and there's a lot of growth, moreover, as more services go cloud and we move away from legacy installations ... Google might even possibly have an advantage.
2. Isn't k8s a play to reinvent this space?
Amazon and MS have vast support networks because enterprise wants to feel like they have some control and feedback on their systems.
Also, unless you can innovate in the space (or go really cheap), why would I ever choose a smaller player over a larger one?
This is another example of the problem these rich companies have where cash is not a problem but identity and direction is.
But, also in think Google does have some advantages. Out of the box, their NLP algorithms seem much better than AWS’s offering. They also offer custom search as an api. I haven’t used it, but bigquery seems very good. I do agree these are probably not enough to have an enterprise shift. Maybe if they specialize on a couple industries that won’t choose amazon (fedex, ups, target, Walmart, streaming/media). It does seem like google has made strong inroads in finance as well.
Azure is doing quite well leveraging Microsoft's existing enterprise relationships. I'm not sure how much success folks are having "lifting and shifting" their Microsoft infrastructure into the cloud, some, maybe?
However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.
Extremely unsurprising, but I'd be interested to read more.
However, that correlates pretty closely with my own personal experience. I've worked with a fair bit of the Azure products and it feels to me very much like a work in progress.
The identity management stuff has been a moving target since day one. That is, how to authorize against the service itself. This is apparent in many of the Python libraries where this is documented.
The Python libraries that I've seen look like they were produced by interns. I'm performance with ADL is pretty rough.
My main goal with Azure was to deploy Kubernetes clusters there. The list of problems is very long and has been documented ad nauseum in many Medium articles. In the 14 or so months I've been working with Azure, it hasn't improved as quickly as I'm accustomed to with AWS and GCP.
A year ago, I shifted the majority of my production infrastructure from AWS to GCP. By comparison to Azure, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the products from GCP. My company uses GSuite which made identity management and RBAC a breeze. The GKE product is way, way better than anything else, and there are a handful of things that I like better than AWS.
I wouldn't encourage anyone to shift from AWS unless they were planning a large Kubernetes implementation. I would encourage folks to try GCP and especially GKE to get a sense of the differences.
There's nothing about Azure that I've discovered yet that would cause me to recommend it to anyone. It's possible that if a company had a heavier investment in MS products that it might be worthwhile, but that's not the case for mine. We only ever use MSSQL occasionally for development purposes and I've found that I can spin up an instance of that quite nicely in k8s with the Microsoft authored helm chart.
Also once you start getting into k8s you will find so much more information in the community with specific instructions for GKE; its by far the best environment to learn in for that reason.
Google falls down in so many other areas though that it probably doesn't matter how good GKE is. The biggest annoyance to me is their Postgres offering still has no point in time recovery.
edit to add: One other big advantage I forgot to mention is that launching a GKE cluster takes only a couple of minutes. I have a Terraform configuration that will launch a GKE cluster and run my deployments and my app is up and running after less than 5 minutes. This makes it much more attractive to do things like spin up a new cluster for each pull request.
I will agree that EKS startup is slow, but given the way it needs to run, I don’t think many customers will want to run more than a few clusters per VPC.
How naive would it be to say there's such potential in Firebase? It seems so different from what's out there now, and Google's putting a lot of effort and resources into it now too (including sunsetting existing products like Google Analytics Mobile in favor of the Firebase versions.)
That is not it at all. What typically happens is an organisation will run a pilot project and see how it goes. On Azure it’s easy to speak to a real person, and they will be knowledgeable and take you seriously, and be empowered and willing to help you. On Google even if you manage to speak to anyone, they’ll treat you like an idiot. Guess who that organisation is going to go to for bigger and bigger projects?
N=1, YMMV, etc.
The problem with this “rule” is it’s a tautology. Any ordered list of N > 1 will have two leaders. (The better question, how are market shares distributed, is difficult to precisely answer given the inherent subjectivity of delineating markets.)
I quite agree that if Google does not get into the top 2 it will likely be irrelevant in that market.
The other aspect, as discussed in the article, is that this is a completely new market and way of doing business for Google, which seems to create a clash of cultures. If that is indeed the case it may be extremely difficult for Google to overcome.
"The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" is a must-read, by the way, as is the one on branding.
From my professional perspective (integration specialist of a database vendor), all enterprises are either going to AWS or Azure. I think this is almost inevitable: the differences between the clouds are simply not big enough to make a difference from an executive's perspective, so to manage risk, you either go with what you know (Azure) or the market leader (AWS).
Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete.
I just don't see this happening under their new cloud leadership (former Oracle, sales-oriented exec). It would have to be driven by massive innovation, not by "doing the same stuff as AWS but then slightly better/cheaper".
What are HN's thought about this?
(Obligatory disclaimer: on a personal level I absolutely love Google Cloud and think it's a much more developer-friendly environment, but professionally I just can't make a strong case for why, say, a financial institution should use Google Cloud rather than AWS or Azure.)
EDIT: Did not expect this topic to be downvoted this far. Is this not an appropriate discussion / violate any rules?
[1] "Law of Duality" https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/d...