> How is Google so clueless to let this leak?

If you create a culture of intense internal competition, where identities are tied to subunits (e.g. a product team) over the company, you incentivise leaks. Google's elitist, "product founder" driven culture, unmonitored by a detached leadership, almost guaranteed this sort of sniping and in-fighting.

This deadline should never have been set in the first place. They should have attached a massive bonus if they exceeded the target by that date instead. Of course, the CEO could have in their head the deadline, but that's be announced internally at earliest 6 months ahead of time.

This is how to lead. (Thanks, I'm internalizing this.)

Who is the internal competitor to Google Cloud?

anyone who will get money if Google Cloud doesn't, or anyone who doesn't like whoever is running Google Cloud or thinks that anyone associated with Google Cloud that pulls it off will be a competitor for the next raise in level etc. etc.

This is like corporate infighting for comedies set in the 50s really.

I don’t think Google internally uses GCP. So a direct competitor would be whoever runs the “real” google cloud that all the internal stuff.

Good point. Google using GCP internally would be strong validation of the product and I think add more comfort for enterprising adopting it.

E.g. what coup would be for Google Search to run on GCP. Imagine the CIO conversation of, “well, if it is good enough for google search, it must be good for me”.

Wait, what? GCP isn't just the productization of their internal infrastructure?

Neither is AWS, or Azure. Cloud platforms are their own product.

Only one company needs Google's internal infrastructure. That company is called Google.

The lessons learned in building those systems can be applied to more generalized solutions which can be sold as standalone products.

> Neither is AWS

This article lists some of the AWS services that now power Amazon.com since they moved away from Oracle. So, while it may not have been true in the past, it does now appear that AWS powers a significant portion of Amazon.com.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...

Amazon using AWS today is entirely different from the origins of AWS or GCP or Azure being productizations of internal infrastructure.

AWS services have always been their own thing, they happen to be useful so today Amazon utilizes them just like anyone else. That doesn't mean the services started internally.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...

I think you're being a bit too literal here. Did AWS merely fork the infrastructure that Amazon.com runs on and start selling it, no. But are you telling me that it wasn't built on the lessons learned of amazon.com and that it doesn't share some aspects of how amazon.com worked a the time (with improvements to the bad parts)? I don't know the answer and maybe it was a clean-room implementation but that seems unlikely to me.

I don't doubt that Amazon.com runs on its own dedicated "installation" of AWS, but are you saying that it doesn't run on AWS at all? That doesn't jive with the infamous "API mandate" email that Bezos wrote that essentially kicked off AWS. Have I been misunderstanding that email all along?

If you think the API mandate necessitated or created AWS then yes, you misunderstand that memo. The API memo simply mandated a service-oriented architecture. That can run on any compute and indeed predates AWS by several years.

The origins of AWS are entirely unrelated, Amazon simply realized it was good at operating infrastructure. This led to the conception of offering infrastructure as a service. The initial AWS service offerings were built based on Amazon's experience and expertise but were not the literal internal services of Amazon.

See https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-... for more historical details.

Amazon (or Google, or Microsoft) is an anomaly, the things Amazon needs to operate Amazon.com are very very different from what most companies need. The internal services and architecture are purpose built although today they do heavily leverage AWS under the hood. Amazon.com is just a customer of AWS, there's no special installation.

Almost nobody needs Amazon.com's infrastructure (except Amazon) or could even afford to staff it. What people do need are generalized, managed services they can combine for their own use cases.

I'm confused because on the one hand you say that their needs are very different and then on the other hand you say that they are using AWS. Another commenter also pointed out that they are using AWS.

I think the only needs that are likely different are scale, so bigger instances, and the fact that they have a massive legacy infrastructure that can't be easily migrated off of. So that's pretty much what I would expect; Amazon.com does use AWS for new stuff but is still operating a lot of legacy as well.

Amazon uses AWS for some new stuff. New AWS services high up in the stack like AI services run mostly on AWS. Most infra-AWS services run on foundational AWS services like EC2 and S3. Foundational AWS services (EC2, S3, DynamoDB, etc.) don't run on AWS for obvious chicken-and-egg reasons. For all of the things that are done by latecomer AWS services you can count on there being an unrelated internal tool, since clearly Amazon was doing those things before they launched those services.

Amazon builds internal services on top of AWS. The services AWS sells are not Amazon internal services.

Microsoft is definitely running on Azure. I can't imagine AWS is doing anything different.

https://www.pcmag.com/article/364611/microsofts-cloud-how-th...

> Guthrie said Microsoft has long had a tradition to "eat our own dog food," which means it runs its own systems on top of the same software it offers to customers. Microsoft IT was an early customer for Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365, and has moved the vast majority of its internal servers to Azure, including its SAP implementation, payment systems, and test systems. This has helped Microsoft learn what it takes to run the technology on an enterprise scale.

That just means Microsoft is using Azure. It doesn’t mean Azure is an internal Microsoft service that was “productized”.

I’m not willing to die on this hill. I could be wrong about the origins of Azure. AWS and GCP are not productized versions of internal services.

AWS and Azure are both used internally at Amazon and MS, respectively, and both began as internal products.

Most of them were either complete rewrites or products that didn’t exist internally. Eg they internally use Borg and not kubernetes.

No. Some parts but the OSS stuff released before was more in line with what the company uses. Google doesn’t require dogfooding of GCP.

That's normal progression. Hardly anyone at Microsoft used Azure in the beginning either, it takes a few years for teams to move infra and deprecate old stuff.

Same for Amazon, it took them very long also, including dedicated internal projects with focus on moving. But majority of Amazon and Microsoft workloads now run on their respective cloud offerings.

Google is probably still be at least 3-5 years before that would happen be aligned. GCP is quite immature and young, which this leak highlights also. I assume this would mean that also internal teams at Google won't be moving workloads to GCP.

In any enterprise competitor doesn't mean a similar product, it means any unit who can get headcount, budget etc. Google said in Q3 that they were spending a ton to grow cloud - which makes all the other kingdom building VPs concerned - they are the competition. Youtube, Gsuite, Ads, whatever else google hasn't abandoned that they charge for.

This doesn't sound like the Google culture I know/participate in.

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

Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

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

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

From two sources.

1) The article.

> The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.

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

> 1) The article.

That only means that the team's head is on the chopping block. That's all.

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

This assertion is utterly absurd as you're describing the world's third largest cloud provider, and thus one of the dominant players, of being "underperforming" and justifying pulling the plug on a 8 billion-dolar a year business.

Google is far from the world’s “third largest provider”

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/public-cloud-market-sha...

As far as the manager “being on the chopping block” the article talks about “losing funding”.

$8 billion in revenue means nothing. Is it profitable?

This is the same company that left an entire city’s streets in disarray after abandoning Google Fiber.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...

> Google is far from the world’s “third largest provider”

You're being a bit disingenuous. Your own source states quite clearly that Google is in the 3rd spot and arguably, if you cherry-pick results, you can place it in 4th.

By cherry-picked results I'm referring to posting 2018 results and ignoring how GCP's revenue doubled in the last 18 months, nearly matching Azure's revenue.

So let’s look at the raw marketshare. It’s 10% of AWS.

Also revenue != profit. If it was profitable enough would management be complaining?

> So let’s look at the raw marketshare. It’s 10% of AWS.

Yes, AWS is 1st. What's your point? Azure is 2nd and GCP is currently 3rd and catching up with Azure. What does AWS has to do with whether GCP is 3rd or 4th?

Jesus, talk about hyperbole. "Far"? Trailing a couple percent behind Alibaba, a chinese only hosting provider? Get real

Alibaba operates and serves internationally.

Let’s take the raw numbers then. 4.8% compared to 47%.

At what growth rate?

Not high enough for management obviously. Also, is it growing profitably.

I believe the 8 billion a year number includes its G-Suite products. My understanding is that GCP itself makes only around 1-2 billion a year (excluding G-Suite). That doesn't seem enough to cover the CapEx, OpEx and engineering costs they are sinking into keeping GCP running.

Only Amazon breaks out its AWS numbers completely today, but the other cloud providers bundle their cloud computing numbers together with other "cloud" numbers, so it makes it very confusing to keep track of what numbers people are talking about.

Is not Amazon also doing this. Just that no one uses Amazon's Word (I just know it exists do not know even its name) :)

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

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

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

They like to use small teams. I wouldn't be surprised if their least-used AWS product is still profitable (aside from brand-new stuff or obvious non-profits like Deep Racer). The idea is to get people into AWS and help keep them there. You don't do that by making life harder or unpredictable for your customers.

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

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-...

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

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

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

And that's not a bad way to move at least in the short term. The problem is that longterm, people will avoid your products pre-emptively for fear of them being vaporware. Especially with something as serious as cloud implementation in an organization. I would hate to be the guys who now have to rearch all their applications to go from GCP to AWS.

Because it's not profitable "enough". Presumably they'd like to reassign their engineers on projects that could make more money.

That makes sense in the abstract but of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of projects Google is currently working on, how many outside of Ads make a sizable amount of profit?

A mildly successful cloud provider would probably make FAR more money long term than the median Google product. Pulling the plug on GCP to build a couple dozen projects that will mostly get killed themselves seems like a huge waste, even without considering all of the negative externalities of burning even more customers by cancelling a major service.

Margin and expected future profits, I assume.

Breaking even doesn’t cut it since capital could be put toward something better. Unless it has some other strategic value (eg, bragging rights, growth potential, security, etc)

Pride? They want to be #1 or nothing at all?

If you look at the way profits are distributed in a category, this goal makes perfect logical sense. What percentage of ad-tech profits do you think Google gets from being #1?

Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to be #1 in every business you touch.

"The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. "

A little bit of reading between the lines combined with Google's history of sunsetting services that aren't creating enough profit.

Since at least as of this writing, nobody else has mentioned this, and it's always someone's day [1] to hear something the first time, this is a variant of something that goes very far back in our industry called the Osbourne Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

The traditional Osbourne Effect that earned the original namesake is to announce your v2 product a long time before it's available, thus trashing your v1 sales and eliminating the resources needed to make the v2 in the first place. But this is fairly similar; by announcing at what point Google is planning on throwing in the towel, everyone is going to think twice about going to GCP, because now everyone knows that everyone else is going to think twice about going to GCP. Consequently, the odds of this article actually creating the future in which Google pulls the plug on GCP are quite good.

Also, note how this is all about perception, and people's beliefs about what other people believe. Arguments like "But GCP is really good!" or "But GCP will surely continue to be very supported by Google right up until then!" would be missing the point. The point is that you need to change not only what everyone believes, but what everyone believes everyone else believes. Easier in some ways, harder in others, but none of those sorts of basic arguments will move the needle one bit. You need different arguments.

So, basically, in our industry, with this sort of folk wisdom widely known, Google damn near announced their plan to shut down GCP after 2023. They didn't. Quite. But damn near. Yes, it's a sort of second or third order conclusion from the literal text of the article, but it's a very easy one that lot of people can make, which ironically is the very thing that makes it true in the first place.

(Also, since PR is pervasively dishonest, putting out a PR release that says "No, srsly, we love GCP and would never dream of shutting it down" will not move the needle anywhere near as much as they'd like. Also in the "what people believe other people believe" department, Google has a reputation now of just shutting things down. GCP would be quite a bit bigger than anything else they've shut down, but, even so, they've shut down some pretty big "all hands on deck" initiatives before, like G+, so we're all going to believe that everyone else is going to find the idea that they might just pull the plug quite plausible. If they had a reputation for supporting things and gracefully shutting them down with care and concern, they'd be in significantly less trouble now.)

[1]: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

An (in)famous recent example of the Osborne effect deserves mentioning here: https://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia...

> How is Google so clueless to let this leak?

They're at war with a subset of the staff over unionizing. And they have a "culture of openness" around internal information.