App Engine is absolutely second to none as a PaaS. Fact is I sleep better at night on App Engine that I ever could on AWS.
Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy? If you're business depends on any cloud provider do yourself a favor and go with AWS, you'll end up in a much better position then if you went with Google.
Disclaimer: I work for Google.
Speaking from (direct personal) experience, someone that malicious needs to be identified quickly and removed, because that's without question not the only thing he's doing due to his disgruntled attitude. Nothing against him, just clearly Google has wronged him in some way and the responsibilities of his legal agreements are no longer important. That means it's time to move on before he harms the company.
Whenever I've spoken about my employment at Google -- even though I was fired inappropriately -- I'm careful not to divulge information that I promised to protect as it's important for my own integrity. And that's even when I have a pretty legitimate gripe with Google. Now that I'm with Apple, a company that ostensibly takes secrecy to an entirely different level than Google, I don't even discuss Apple in public. Ever. I know better.
I'd talk to Global Security about this if I were you since a case could be made that he tried to throw your LDAP under the bus.
Anyone can append a disclaimer to an anonymous comment claiming all sort of stuff.
Also one would expect Google employees to be smart his/her comment conveys the opposite: there is no inherent conflict between being mostly about mobile while providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares which are also becoming increasingly mobile.
There is a large amount of malice targeted at Google and much of it manifests in HN comments, as this threat would suggest.
If "joebar" here completely made up the question and answer I bet one of the numerous lurking Googlers would have called him on it by now, even though it's a confidential meeting because (a) not everybody cares about nondisclosure to the same extent you and I do and (b) it's not like you're divulging corporate secrets, you're just saying that's a made up story. Pretty simple. "That story isn't true." Done. Legal gray area, but Google is pretty lax on social media until you fuck up.
I should clarify that it's probably a safe bet that the Q&A happened (and, honestly, sounds like Larry) but I disagree with the commenter's analysis.
> Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy?
Granting, for the sake of argument, that the story you relate is true, um, yes? One of the big things in Google's cloud platform push has been to build infrastructure that on which applications can be built for Google end-user platforms -- Android and Chrome. If Google was adopting a mobile-as-central-end-user-focus strategy, then backend services that support mobile development like Cloud Platform (and tools that rely on it like Cloud Endpoints) would seem to be rather important.
> you're business depends
> better position then if
How did you get a job at google?
Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobile.
I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android.
Mind you, I'm a huge Google fan, but it (as an org) makes some pretty terrible decisions collectively.
Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity most people won't fathom) and do it well.
I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things work.
The only way for Google to innovate now is through acquisitions and acquihires.
Also, it's perfectly acceptable to enter new markets through acquisitions and apply Google's innovations there. That is a form of innovation in my opinion.
You're also hopping the goalposts around a bunch between revenue, success, and some subjective measure of "quality", but Android has over a billion activations, Chrome has three-quarters of a billion active users, GMail has 600+ million active users...again, one would have to be a complete fool (or a recent immigrant from Mars) to think that "only GoogleX and AdWords have had success".
By the way, in case you're planning to move the goalposts again to focus on only revenue, if you can't understand the concept of a product having monetary value without directly being a source of revenue, then I'm honestly just in awe of how little you understand how any of the industry works.
Also, user experience is not the be all and end all. Profitability on the other hand...
Yes, yes, I know. Adwords. They better hope licensing for self-driving cars takes off.
... Sorry, everybody. I'd missed that one yesterday. :( We now return you to your regularly scheduled Google-skepticism
First GAE was one price. We attended Google I/O session and learned about the virtues of fully using BigTable, so we wrote our application to be tightly integrated into GAE (stupid mistake). Then GAE got a 10X (1000% percent) price increase. Effectively removing the service if you based your business on the initial pricing structure. Now, google is talking about Moore's law and how the service should be cheaper.
Why do I trust google less? Because I don't get a feeling Google has any long-term strategy here. It seems like they're winging it every 6-12 months. In contrast Amazon and AWS have been steadily marching in one direction.
I want to like GCE/GAE, I still run services from it, it's good for some use cases. But in back of my mind, I know google can pull the rug at any moment, depending on the popular flavor of the month.
So what am I saying? Use it at your own risk. It's good for somethings but there are other solutions and there are businesses where cloud services is their main or only business. You know those guys will steadily innovate and build up their services.