I've since left, but when I joined Google in 2018 one of the things they talked about excitedly at the orientation was how GCP was poised to be successful with enterprise. I may be misremembering some of the details, but they explained they had just hired a woman from Oracle(?) into a VP role for GCP who explained to them how an enterprise sales funnel worked, so now they were beefing up their sales team and GCP would finally get some real traction in enterprise.

It didn't _seem_ like they were being sarcastic, but they for some reason were claiming that the management team didn't understand how enterprise sales worked after a decade of trying to sell GCP, and were saying that like it was a good thing.

it can be good / a relief to find out you've been doing it wrong the whole time, because it means that now you can do it right and you may yet reach your objective

There are so many juicy morsels from that story.

For example, embedded in the entire concept is the unwavering belief that Googlers has that their stuff is just by definition BETTER. I don't know if this is part of the orientation or the culture, or just the kinds of people that the Google hiring process is optimized for (the absolutely most insufferable software engineers i know wind up at Google), or just a lot of kool-aid drinking from the cloud department, but they clearly believe that the only reason they're not winning is sales. Not that they didn't build as good a product. Not that AWS or Azure just might be better at anything.

Not a woman. They hired Thomas Kurian from Oracle [1]

1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kurian-469b6219

How does google lose so much money with GCP? 858m in operating losses? [0]. Where are they burning money? Hardware, salaries, sales, promos?

[0]: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523200/Google-results...

Just want to mention that the URL you posted is missing some parts in it, here is the working one:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523200/Google-results...

In my experience, Google showers companies with incentives and discounts to get them on the platform based on spend commits/forecasts that never materialize

If Google showers companies, Azure is (or was?) the Niagara waterfall.

Steam is anything but a monopoly, there's a reason EGS got as far as it did.

Yes, entering a market with a huge war-chest and dumping an absolute fuckton of free product is one way to attack a monopoly. There's a reason they had to do that to gain any traction.

I've paid for one game on there. It was an exclusive and is the only reason I finally installed the damn thing. I think I'm up to about 150 games on Epic, and I didn't even get in near the beginning and have missed a few since. What they've managed to buy from me, with that, is a +1 in their install-base stat because the free games every couple weeks keep me from uninstalling it, but I still buy everything on GoG or Steam. I don't even care if epic has a lower price, I use one of those.

If Stadia had taken the same approach, the average account would have spent $100 or less but would "have" $3000+ worth of games.

Why do publishers not offer end-users the right to transfer games from one service to another? That would allow new platforms to compete.

I can understand that established services like Steam oppose the transfer of licenses. But why don't the less established services remove the fear of losing access by making the licenses transferable among themselves? This must be prevented by the publishers. What's their benefit?

GoG did something a little like this. You could add copies of some games in Steam to your GoG account, by linking them—not just, like, letting you launch them through the same interface, but you'd "own" a copy on GoG, too.

I don't think it really took off. It was a little clunky and I'm not sure they got enough buy-in from publishers that the catalog available ever expanded much past their initial offering.

More broadly, I'd love to see a strict, legally-mandated separation of media distribution and production. Mostly for the film and TV industry (there's precedent—the US only very recently stopped barring movie studios from owning movie theaters, because it caused serious problems in the past, similar to how vertical integration of studios and streaming platforms is making things worse today) but maybe something similar would help the game market work better for consumers/users, too.

Decoupling the physical media from the license to access that media would be a huge boon for consumers and creators but publishers will need to be forced into it.

The ideal would be an open system where you can buy a license directly from the creator (or from a publisher on the creators behalf) then retrieve that content from any publisher by presenting your proof-of-purchase.

Because they want to be the winner, gain the monopoly, and eat the big pie all by themselves.

> The only thing that could have given them the advantage - not, not Kubernetes, although K was and is a great thing to fund - was a "cloud in a box" product, so companies could install a rack of GCP in their existing Data Centers, and use it.

That hit the Google “no accountability” tarpit: Anthos looked cool, nobody cared to show up to sell it. Amazon shows up.

My account team tried to sell anthos, but they knew nothing beyond “it’s for the dc”. They had no idea what it actually was, or what problems it would solve. They’d get us on the phone with engineers who would just ask if we use VMware and when we said no, it’s like… oh well doesn’t work for you. They failed to educate internally or have any cohesive plans for it. They couldn’t even define what it was

We literally gave up after asking a number of times for a quote. The only other company I’ve had that happen with was IBM.

> GCP: copycat of AWS

I don't think it's fair. Compute and networking are still ahead of AWS, although the gap is narrowing. GKE was great from the get go, but today it's not much of a differentiator.