They are an internet company. This is how internet companies work, generate such high profits, and command such high valuations.

Businesses which scale by hiring are much harder to grow and tend to be a lot less profitable. As a result, internet companies tend to see such businesses as not worth being in. Sure, there are lots of successful companies which operate this way, but Google sees it as an unacceptably high opportunity cost. Rather than pour resources into growing a scale by hiring business, they would rather put the resources toward a different business that they think they can scale with non-linear hiring.

Given this, it surprises me that Google is going after the enterprise cloud business. It is pretty well known that such businesses scale fairly linearly with sales and support staff. My understanding is that they know this and are attempting to scale the business this way instead of their usual strategy of ignoring the issue and hoping it will go away.

> They are an internet company. This is how internet companies work, generate such high profits, and command such high valuations.

When something goes wrong, Apple, Amazon and Netflix (as examples) all manage to provide free, robust customer service.

Google can afford to support it's customers. They choose not to.

> My understanding is that they know this and are attempting to scale the business this way instead of their usual strategy of ignoring the issue and hoping it will go away.

Ha ha. Last I heard, Google were actively trying to remove their engineers from client engagements, and replace them with third party "Google preferred suppliers". They really don't want to ever be face to face with a customer.

Isn't that every big tech company?

Yeah, because satisfying shareholders is more important than providing a quality service. Entropy exists even in digital systems. Maintenance is a must, and the easiest thing to overlook is the people who use your services (providing them value) when the people who pay for the value the users provide as the ones putting money in your bank account.

It's too easy to forget that if you do not take care of the users, they will leave and take the payers with them. Right now it's hard to escape Google.

But a little river carved the Grand Canyon, and as more people leave the services and provide easy to use alternatives, more people will follow. My guess is that, even though it might take 20 years if Google does not redirect their focus to be more equilaterally supportive of their users then Google will inevitably become a modern Yahoo.

This is a complete tangent, but to be fair, the river was much larger when said carving began. :)

Rim to rim, the canyon is pretty darned wide.

> Given this, it surprises me that Google is going after the enterprise cloud business. It is pretty well known that such businesses scale fairly linearly with sales and support staff. My understanding is that they know this and are attempting to scale the business this way instead of their usual strategy of ignoring the issue and hoping it will go away.

GCP can't get their act together to get a consistent enterprise sales model done....

You're missing the point, this debate isn't about FAANG profits, it's about protecting democracy.

Maybe the root issue was letting 4 private companies control the entire public debate with dangerous moderation practices.

Indeed.

This is the reason I was able to sway the C suite at my last position to avoid anything Google. I'm estimating it's probably around $9m/month revenue they lost from GCE and GApps.

They're simply not trustworthy, no/terrible support, and capricious about arbitrarily holding user's data hostage when some random automated abuse system decides you're horrible.

System Engineers don't let fellow system engineers use anything google for production purposes.

"Shareholders" and the McNamara Fallacy mostly

For others like me who didn't know what the McNamara Fallacy is, here's a quote from its Wikipedia Page [1]:

"The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with using numbers and there's nothing that can't be quantified. The problem is when important metrics which are hard to turn into numbers are ignored. or, when metrics aren't reevaluated to combat over-fitting.

" there's nothing that can't be quantified"

That is indeed....your opinion.

McNamara Fallacy - thank you for posting this, it's extremely obvious, but seeing it in print is super helpful, and I think it's important for anyone working in a corporate setting to keep in mind

I've worked in this industry long enough to understand when people are "McNamaranites" and I tend to push back against them....vigorously.

To be a person is to not be reduced to an array of arbitrary scores in a worksheet.

At YouTube's scale I don't see how you can have manual reviewers without making it a paid service. The amount of videos uploaded per day is just way too high.

Why does scale always come up as an excuse in these discussions? If one employee can profitably monitor 10k uploads per day, a thousand employees can profitably monitor 10m.

This is unfair. It's a cyber attack on Youtube, and I'm sure the people at Youtube are frantically working on mitigations. It's an ongoing battle and hopefully Russia is burning their bot networks over this.

It's completely fair - YouTube picked a business model that has certain benefits and costs and this is one of the costs.

They are happy to reap the benefits so it is fair to put the costs on them.

Do you think they could be prepared in advance for this kind of attack? Maybe, but you are not the man in the arena. I don't know for certain, but I know at least one engineer on the youtube team and I'm willing to bet that they're frantically writing software to match a new and painful set of assumptions about how the world works.

How are you helping?

> Do you think they could be prepared in advance for this kind of attack?

This is not a new attack in either type or scope. It's merely more visible.

> How are you helping?

Not at all. I don't benefit from YouTube's business model so why do you think that I have some obligation to help YouTube?

Of course, since you think that I have some obligation, you surely do. What are you doing besides attacking people who point out that this is a foreseeable consequences of YT's business decisions?

I wonder how soon administration recognizes this is a national security threat.