One is that you can't trust them to stick with a product offering. They are driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than some deeper vision for the world. So I'm always suspicious that they will abandon anything they launch.
Two is that they don't believe in offering quality support. I had this issue with an Android app recently. It got flagged incorrectly for a compliance concern and I was not able to reach a knowledgable human under any circumstances, including getting it escalated by internal Google staff. I would have easily paid a support contract, $1k or more, to get access to a human. In the end, I had to guess at what their algorithm was flagging and just ended up tricking it through trial and error.
But why? Per OP - they'd be willing to pay for an enterprise support contract. Why should a mom and pop shop expect that their experience being a small fish will be any different in GCP than literally EVERY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE?
It's one thing to tell people using a free service that their only option is automated support - it's quite another to tell customers you just flat-out refuse to offer a paid support model. That tells me that you are organizationally deficient at providing customer support. I've yet to hear anyone using paid g suite speak praises about their support experience if they ever have issues. Quite the opposite.
Well, for one thing, everyone you ask except apparently the HN comment section will tell you.
I've probably seen this exact conversation play out 10+ times now. Someone says that GCP has poor customer support by analogy to other, mostly free services. Someone who actually uses GCP customer support claims that this is not the case. Some third (or perhaps the original) person blows them off and insists that Google's behavior toward the statistically adversarial and free users of other services must be representative of Google's behavior toward an entirely different group of users.
It's baffling.
Not to mention that I have had rocky issues with GCP as well. There was documentation that lied about its caching behavior, cost me over $1000 of my personal money, they took over a year to fix the bug and offered no reimbursement. Maybe I'm a small fry and don't deserve support, but this is the kind of customer management that Google is absolutely terrible at.
You go to a restaurant, try a dish and it gives you food poisoning. Do you have to go back and try every single item on the menu? The other ones might be great, but realistically you probably go to a different restaurant after that.
It's easy to talk about Google apps that have been killed. But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
So given that, I can take in and acknowledge what you're saying about GCP having good or even great support. I just don't have any faith that it will last.
I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple. I pay a small amount to Apple and have no problem getting my support rep on the phone and all support experiences I've had there have been amazing. So why doesn't the Android experience compare? I just don't see it in Google's DNA to fight to win. Android has given up and is trying to be the lowest quality second place they can be. And that's exactly what I expect to happen from GCP. Maybe GCP will fight hard at the beginning to establish itself, but after that, I expect them to do the minimal amount to maintain third place.
Maybe that's the case, but I can't see it. Cloud computing is such a huge business, it doesn't take more than a third-place position to make more money than say, Youtube. Some random article [1] has GCP's 2019 Q4 revenue at $2.6B compared to Youtube at $4.7B, and total revenue in the cloud market is definitely going up way faster than total revenue in the advertising market. Plus, the "Google sucks at products" narrative is based on a reputation that people at Google would much rather be building technology than products. Cloud computing seems like the perfect match for such a reputation. App Engine is almost as old as AWS, and looks very much like it started as an excuse to have something for Guido Van Rossum to do.
> I saw their Android support through the lens of comparing them to Apple.
> So why doesn't the Android experience compare?
It came out in the Google vs Oracle lawsuit that Android had only made Google something like $10B since it started. So GCP is already making something like 10x what Android makes, and given cellphone saturation this will likely only grow.
> But there's an entirely different category which just got abandoned or lost their ambition.
AWS has a whole pile of services that you can tell no longer get any attention, or in some cases, even have full time staff anymore. Services that still aren't integrated with CloudFormation after years and years because clearly nobody cares. A guarantee that the lights stay on and the service continues to handle requests is the most you can ask or get from any of the existing cloud providers.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-revenue-first-t...
That’s also a wrong assumption. Android devs may very well be paid GCP customers if they had a great experience with the Android platform.
I am not talking about only full stack solo developers, I am also talking about companies with mobile apps with backend needs.
Their support is downright AWFUL. Getting someone from Google to help is so challenging that they have decided that in order to work with them on their enterprise offerings you must go through a 3rd party vendor. Their third party vendors are all small companies with which my organization has very little trust for.
I will never knowingly try to do anything with Google again after the hellish experience I have had dealing with them and their vendors so far, it just isn't worth it.
Free Android app developers
We're not going to be the biggest fish, but our spend is approaching $1mio per year. If you spend more than that and have a TAM YMMV.
You just described their problem. You pay them money, whatever they ask, and are shocked that e human provided support to you
I understand Google heavily rewards new product launches with promotions. Is that part of company culture not at all within the GCP org? I don't know, I'm asking.
People aren't conflating GCP with the rest of Google. They're just unaware of any markedly different promotion incentives in that org.
"I got a counterfeit product on Amazon, therefore I won't trust AWS".
Trust is trust, and if amazon can't be trusted to behave well in one context, over time, that erodes people's trust in the platform to behave well in other contexts. Thats what's going on with Google - they killed reader, and it's the same company, why are we magically expecting different behavior in cloud?
It might not be warranted, but that's irrelevant. Trust is earned, and Google isn't entitled to it, they have to earn it. Doesn't matter how they lost it, market forces are market forces, they need to get it back
This is actually a good argument. I can easily imagine that this could become a problem for Amazon in the future.
"Amazon continues to allow counterfeits to pervade. I cannot trust them with anything important."
I feel exploited. I feel like I am the product. This might work when providing a free service to the public but we, developers, are not the general public.
As condescending and cliche as it may sound, we don't like our time wasted. Google's free services should be a magnet to entice, a funnel to capture and channel our hearts and minds, not the developer repellant they have become.
The fact that someone has to spell this is out is a testament to how out of touch Google has become with its traditional base - developers.
Of course it affects GCP, because due to their existing reputation, people think “Google has not cancelled any GCP product yet”
You have to be kidding me. Their payed support is terrible. We recently had a problem with occasional timeouts contacting the GCE container registry which causes our autoscaling groups to sometimes fail to start new nodes.
I shit you not but this one of the selected support answers (after many prior back and forth). Obviously, this issue is still ongoing after many days.
"Thank you for your information.
I have searched our internal documentation about any service outage and any network issues open recently, And so far I can’t find any explanation of your issue.
However, I found the following instruction [1] where describe how to run a local copy of the Google Docker Registry.
In addition, also attached the docs where described about how to set up a private Docker registry [2].
If above instruction does not work then please let me know and I will be happy to help you.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27243294/unable-to-pull-... [2] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
Seriously? Run a private registry? We don't run a private registry because we don't want to deal with that stuff.
https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-googl...
You've really hit the nail on the head for me there. The people I really respect are the people who can look at idea a and say "that's failing because it's a bad idea" and look at idea b and say "that's a good idea, but we need to work harder at it". Google (from the outside) appears to say "These are all ideas, and they failed, kill them". There's no understanding or insight into the world, there's only 'experiments', which is as good as throwing a random number generator at an authentication system.
That tends to promote product churn.
Don't forget that Amazon is essentially a retailer, and their a certain amount of customer trust is essential.
Don't forget the support. I used to work at a Series B startup, and AWS provided excellent support. We probably tossed them a few million a year, so I can only imagine what kind of white-glove top-tier support a big enterprise spender would've received.
We got responses for anything ranging from general UI questions to highly-in-the-weeds Redshift technical questions within 1 business day. >90% of the time, the issue was resolved upon the first response.
Google on the other hand, has very poor support. Facebook is by no means a support paragon either.
For this reason alone, I see a Microsoft-Amazon cloud duopoly with anyone else being a minor player as the only outcome. When shit hits the fan (as it is now) you need enterprise support capabilities.
Google we can't even get them to answer an email.
Google is more important to our parent org than Amazon; Google is a strategic partner, Amazon is simply another tech vendor. We might be part of a 11-12 figure megacorp now, but Amazon hasn't treated us too differently from since we were a tiny startup with not much spend, and neither has Google.
Google "support" is horrendous. You cannot PAY to get them to help you. We were on google apps (a long time ago now) and there was some state issue with admin transitions - so you'd get stuck. 100's of begging comments from plenty of PAYING users about the issue on their forums. Calls got you zilch. Crickets. Finally 2 years later - oh, we noticed blah blah and this might work now.
I would never trust anything critical to google. They literally will NOT take your money to help you - we'd have paid $10K to have someone press whatever damn button needed pressing.
One of our engineers needed to send out a couple hundred individual emails to other people inside our company. So, being an engineer he automated it, wrote a little script to send the emails via SMTP. I guess some system within Gmail flagged it as suspicious behavior and froze our account. Oh hey, now no one in the company can send or receive email. Great. IT tries to contact support. They told him to send an email from our account to open a ticket. We can't send emails. Took several hours of phone tag to eventually reach a human who wasn't on a helpdesk flow chart. His response? Google can't/won't do anything just wait for the automated systems to eventually release the freeze in the next few days.
So yeah, no company emails for the next day or so. Google thought that was a perfectly OK way to run an enterprise software service.
I like their search / email products though.
GCP support tended to give more generic or vague answers, or would simply "unblock you to the next blocker". As a support expert, you'd hope they understood the workflows, didn't seem to be the case. Google searches seem to indicate this isn't too uncommon amongst cloud platform users. GCP is the technically most sophisticated product, but my experience as a user was stability was far more comforting when fires broke out, as they will for any cloud vendor.
As an aside, I once experienced a G Suite "circular lockout" issue where I had to request permissions from myself. I spent hours agonizing over fixing it, and never actually heard back on that issue at all from the support team. I'm sure GCP and GSuite are independent support teams, though.
Note: I haven't used GCP in a bit over 12 months. Maybe things have changed since then, I don't know. But it certainly seemed that if you're a small company, they don't really care about you. I'd assume that GCP's large enterprise clients received excellent support.
It seems like half the time AWS's tier-1 support sends the me a link to the documentation that I linked to in my ticket, the other half the time I spend hours, sometimes days of engineering time to get the logs they asked for, only for them to come back with "I talked with the product team and oh yeah that's a known issue". If I'm really lucky, I don't have to prove to them it's their fault that something's broken before they admit that there's a problem.
Frustratingly, it's all covered under NDA, which is where things really get ugly, because you can't even really talk about it. I'm sure support is awesome if you're Netflix spending however many millions of dollars a month. Maybe at that level there's a secret site that straight up says product X has limitations Y and Z, but after having to prove to AWS that the problem is on their end, multiple times, their enterprise support is worthless. It's a good lever to push on in a contact though.
I've never used GCP support so can't say anything about it.
I promise you that there is not. :)
Usually it went the other way. We (Netflix) would say "hey we think we found a limit in product X" and they would come back later and say, "huh you're right no one has ever seen that before". Then we'd get on the phone with the engineer who wrote it and we'd work through the bug together.
So in a sense, yes, we had amazing support, but only because we were their beta testers. It was a good relationship though, because it meant when we had problems we got a lot of help.
They were always willing to put the resources in to make sure we were insanely happy.
But talking to other customers, that part of the equation seems to be there no matter who you are.
You sure about that? GCP has hired (or acquihired - Diane Greene for example) sales/management execs from all of the big boys in the industry (VMWare, SAP, Oracle, etc).
1) I see no indication it's "failing", just lagging behind the others.
2) My theory as to why its been lagging behind AWS/Azure is because of trust. AWS was first and is now the "no one got fired for using AWS" of cloud computing. Microsoft is simply entrenched. Oh you want to migrate your on-premise Hyper-V Windows OS's to Azure, we'll gladly help you click this button. Google is notorious for lack of "can I call a person?" support and I think that's permeated itself into its enterprise sales.
And by struggling I mean struggling to keep up with Amazon and Microsoft, whose cloud computing units are significantly larger and growing faster in both absolute dollars and by percentage.
In other words they are behind and falling father behind.
Where are those specific numbers? AFAIK they don't split it out from all of Google Cloud.
EDIT: I did some quick googling and no one seems to share anything. So where are you getting your guidance may I ask?
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/05/googles-still-not-sharing-...
They also had to grit there teeth and embrace Linux, which would have never happened if Ballmer was still there. There is just no demand/need for Windows only cloud offering. You want to be in cloud? You better embrace Linux.
I don't have exposure to their offerings but I've heard this and it is rarely qualified with specifics. What is it they have that is superior?
Edit: Amusingly I was downvoted for providing specifics. So I guess others don't agree with my assessment?
Serverless is a great example of this. GCP and Azure both have serverless offerings, but neither of them has the equivalent of Lambda Layers, which has been groundbreaking.
Even if we grant that Google's network is better, how can you point to that single dimension and claim that GCP is a better cloud platform? For most business's use cases it would be professional malpractice to recommend GCP over AWS or Azure.
AWS has a much bigger breadth of offerings, and I 100% agree with you that it would be malpractice to recommend GCP over AWS, for myriad reasons.
But by mentioning Lambda layers, for example, you're not making an oranges to oranges comparison.
For the actual functions offering, for example, the Google one is cheaper, has more consistent network access to the data stores, and starts up faster. Technically superior in every way.
But I would never use GCP's serverless offering unless I had to.
The fact that Oracle's main relational database offerings are still the most technologically sophisticated does not mean that Oracle Cloud is technologically superior to AWS (or GCP for that matter). It just means that they beat the other cloud providers at one thing.
That sounds like an antitrust investigation waiting to happen. (Or it should; that Google hasn't been murdered by prosecutors suggests that the system isn't working as it should)
AFAIK, Google does not require third parties working with Google to use GCP
Oh no, I don't think so; I was thinking of their exploiting their search dominance to push Chrome.
Some media sales-people would be super comfortable selling enterprise stuff (because a bunch of them started at MS/Oracle/Sun etc).
The front-of-house salespeople would be fine, so you'd just need to hire the back-of-house sales-people (normally the more technical ones).
The real problem is that Marketing and IT are very different departments, and it's hard to change contacts in one area into opportunity in another (I think this applies to both Google and FB).
But mostly, to answer the titular question: it's about margins, nothing else. There's less money in cloud than in ads. So, like Google, they'll probably do something like this when investors start to worry about the ad market.
It's the opposite in enterprise tech where Google is the underdog and needs to do quite a bit of selling, and base it on the strength of the product and functionality. GCP is hiring strongly for enterprise/software sales experience but struggling with the leadership to use them effectively.
There's plenty of margins in cloud though. AWS has proven it and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads business, but I agree that it's not currently as lucrative today.
Paraphrasing OP: Google knew how to sell ads, not how to sell cloud...
- The Dynamics suite
- Visual Studio / TFS
- Windows Server family products
All of those were "cloud-adjacent" even in their proto-forms as on-premises–only offerings. Even if they weren't "real cloud infrastructure" they were big Capital-E Enterprise products and a lot of selling cloud is still B2B Capital-E Enterprise work at the end of the day.
Microsoft sales has a skillset of going into a company, talking to the CIO/COO/CTO/CEO and selling them infrastructure to run their business.
Google has the skills of going to the CMO or the marketing manager and selling them advertising.
Which of those skill sets translates more directly to selling cloud infrastructure?
(Though it hasn't seemed to work effectively for IBM. That may just be IBM incompetence as old school commodity-priced Mainframe mentality should be exactly the same as cloud sales. There's probably an amusing alternate world where IBM Cloud is using something like 1950s presentations only slightly modified to sell "cloud" in 2020, just because they could.)
Google had experience in the former. Microsoft had endless experience in the later.
https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-op...
That does sound good, even for someone like me who has spent considerable effort ridding my life of FB's influence.
The killer product they have is their users and the data mined from them. Allowing third-party apps to leverage their infrastructure as a service would be brilliant.
No it's not...
Amazon did it a long time ago, and when they started, they had no sales team. They had to build that capability slowly over time, but they had the first mover advantage, so they had time to learn. Now they are number one.
Microsoft already had the enterprise sales team, they had to learn how to sell cloud. They had some trouble with the shift, and with the technology, but now they are knocking it out of the park, and are solidly in the number two spot behind Amazon.
Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team, nor the experience in building one. They are trying, but they haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, and in the meantime, Amazon and Microsoft just keep growing.
This is the position Facebook would be in. They probably have the technology, or can at least attract the necessary talent to build it (I know that I would at least listen if they said, “Come build a new cloud with us from the ground up”). But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google.
Now, in Google’s defense, they have realized they are coming from behind, and as such have focused on selling their higher level services. If you want to do AI and Machine Learning, Google’s cloud is the place to do it! And then maybe while you’re there, if your core business is AI, maybe you’ll use some of their other services as well, since your data is already there.
Facebook could make a similar play. They could build a cloud and then require any 3rd party apps that work with Facebook to use their cloud. This would jumpstart their adoption, and could potentially help them solve their privacy issues. They could require that you never send any personal Facebook data out of their cloud, and could closely monitor all the outbound traffic. Then they could theoretically allow even more access to Facebook data, if they knew they could control what happens to that data after the 3rd party gets hold of it.
In other words they could launch a cloud that lets you run your 3rd party Facebook apps in a controlled and audited way, and even give you building blocks to do it quickly and efficiently. It would boost their bottom line, because there is good margins in compute and storage, and at the same time give them more control of their own data.