It sounds like he's mostly taking the "good bits" – scaling the sales teams to be closer to those of competitors, and making the product offering more compelling for enterprise customers.
As a Google Cloud customer, I really hope that he doesn't take the "bad bits" – raising prices, unnecessary lock-in, slow moving technology, litigation. As an engineer in a team where engineers lead decisions like which cloud provider to use, rather than some exec on the golf course, I hope they keep their appeal to those customers who don't want to play the enterprise sales game.
I can't confirm that, they are providing good support as a sales tactic, rather than because of our spend. To clarify: I don't have first-hand experience with their support, but I've heard from colleagues that it's been fine.
I've had awful support. They reached out to me after I had an issue two months ago and CC'd 6 engineers but then stopped responding to my emails when it time to actually schedule time to "discuss my architecture". I tweeted about this, @GoogleCloud responded instantly, promised they would poke their support people. That was a week ago and I have heard nothing since. I've sent three follow-up emails.
Same here but based on AWS experience going from 50k a year place to many millions per month of AWS spend resulted in very drastic change in support level and access to senior tech people when needed. I would imagine someone who really moves the needle like Netflix gets unprecedented level of access.
No. Their enterprise support is not great, they happily leave bugs in production unless you complain loud enough, their user management and security policies don’t really scale to large orgs. It’s really not a great experience as an enterprise compared to other clouds, they don’t seem to really care about you
> their user management and security policies don’t really scale to large orgs
Really? This is interesting. I am not working in a large org, but all of the issues we've had with their user management have essentially come down to it being designed for companies much larger than we are, with much more complex security requirements.
Can you elaborate on what doesn't scale? What sort of requirements are they not meeting? Is it _targeting_ large orgs and getting it wrong, or is it targeting too-small orgs in your opinion?
the default service account is a project editor, which is insanely over-privileged, yet everything tries to use it, and all the demos. Appengine only supports one service account for all apps, even if you have multiple apps, also Editor. similar things in gke.
Their pre-defined roles are a mess, and not consistent across services. Theres a role called 'dataflow admin' defined as the 'minimal permissions to run a job' which isn't what id call admin.
So if you try to use custom roles instead, cause the predefined roles are crazy, they will make breaking changes to permissions(literally did this last week with no notice).
Support access doesnt use IAM and only supports users, not groups, and no api - you have to go to a web form and add each user individually. good luck if you have more than a couple users, and have fun trying to keep that in sync.
The fact that its tied to gsuite is a problem as well, a gsuite admin is also a gcp admin, which is generally owned by different orgs(IT vs dev).
it seems like every month we have a new breaking change, or price change(maps is biting us constantly for some reason)
ultimately what it comes down to is weve been burned enough that we dont trust google
Thanks, lots of good details, this does make sense.
We have hit a few of these. I hadn't even thought about the GSuite/GCP crossover – that's kind of good for us, but yeah in a larger company I guess they would be totally different orgs.
If you are having G Suite in mind (not GCP) I think you are talking about how you can manage some group policies only with organizational units and not with groups (this does not indeed scale well at all). If my assumptions are wrong please do elaborate your original post.
Some of it is marketing. I've been in the room when they've tried to sell before, and Google is too cocky and arrogant.
Some of it is cowing to typical enterprise asks, like redlining objectionable contract terms, willingness to deploy on-site consultants, supporting versions for longer time horizons, being more flexible with egress charges since enterprise places can't migrate all at once, offering experts up to your finance org to explain how to make cloud compute a capital (vs expense) line item, etc. Things MSFT is very good at, AMZN at least tries, and GOOG historically has ignored.
IME GCP sales sucks but account manager (“executive”) / customer success people are chill. They know all the bad parts that everyone wants fixed and share in your plight.
I was very surprised Diane Greene was pushed out and then Google brought in an exec from Oracle of all places. No CIO wants to hear a vendor is following the Oracle playbook which is basically: hire really aggressive sales people who overpromise and win deals at any cost, and then, when customers are locked in, make them pay through the nose for it.
"Kurian estimated to the Journal that Google Cloud's sales team is only between one-tenth and one-fifteenth the size of the sales teams at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. But he's planning to ramp up this tiny fraction, with goals of making Google Cloud's sales teams half the size of its peers"
That's a small sales force. You can build solid products, but you've got to have a sales force to go with it. Amazon had advantages as the first big mover in the cloud market. If you're coming in later, you've got to be able to sell.
I can say that Google is never even at the table for large-scale cloud migration strategies (though, to be fair, neither is Oracle). But their offerings also lack Amazon’s powerful first-mover advantage or Microsoft’s ecosystem and developer reach. Beyond that it’s not evident that Google knows how to /support/ enterprise customers, let alone sell to them. It’s going to take more than adding a bunch of enterprise sales teams for them to make GCP a serious contender.
To make matters worse, Larry Page has no demonstrated skill (expertise, history, success, et al) when it comes to competing in enterprise. He has no idea what to do. If he did, they wouldn't be where they are now in cloud. People widely dislike Ellison for understandable reasons, and yet he's an animal at doing all the things you have to to win in enterprise. From sales to the conferences to the non-stop public touting and everything in-between. Page isn't even in the same galaxy as Ellison when it comes to understanding how to fight it out in enterprise. Further to that point, he simply has no personal interest in it, clearly. There's nobody at the top in Google that knows how to compete in that arena. Amazon and Microsoft will continue to perpetually eat their lunch accordingly. Bezos personally promoted AWS in the early days, he knew the opportunity and was willing to work to capture it. Even Ballmer for all his faults as a tech CEO, coming from a sales background - and understanding enterprise well - he understood and was fine with Microsoft having to roll up its sleeves to compete in pursuit of the cloud opportunity. The rolling Google Cloud disaster starts at the very top.
That’s an excellent point — I can name multiple cases when Ellison personally sold $x00mm deals to CEOs at (quite literally) baseball games, and Nadella has made personal pitches for Azure for major opportunities, but are Page/Brin/Pichai going to do c-suite grip and grins? Doesn’t seem like their strong suit, and it would require a strategic-level bet on enterprise that I just don’t think they’re willing to make, given the fact that adtech is their major cash cow.
Well GCP is mostly targeting highly sophisticated companies who need low cost but don’t need much handholding. Microsoft is on the opposite end. Amazon is in between.
Google is DigiKey, Amazon is Adafruit, and Microsoft is Best Buy.
Mind that for instance MSFT includes diffrent SaaS offerings like Office 356 and all their business software (to which neither Amazon or Google have competing offerings) in their numbers on cloud sales. IaaS/PaaS is just a part of it.
I cannot recapitulate your claim: google is at the least 80% the price of AWS across both instances and storage, given a good faith, reasonable analysis (given the differences in config types and feature sets in the two services).
The basic instance n1-standard-1 vs c5.large is 80% more expensive on AWS. A shame AWS doesn't provide single core instances.
Google gives 30% discount automatically on instances running for a full month. AWS has no such thing. That's enough to put them in different league.
Anything AWS involving SSD or provisioned IOPS is abusively priced whereas Google simply has better performance on network storage and can attach any amount of local SSD to any instance.
I can think of no worse way to entice technologists to flock to your cloud platform than to announce that you're "borrowing from the Oracle playbook"...
This is sensationalist. Reading the article, it seems like he's going to invest much more in an aggressive sales team, which they desperately need.
Google Cloud sucks at enterprise sales. By all objective measures, Oracle absolutely owns this part. It's not as black and white as they need to become Oracle in order to learn some things from them.
As someone who consults with a lot of enterprises and helps them with their cloud architecture, I can see first hand that the market share of Google Cloud there is about 0. It's only internal, toy projects and nothing critical, because they already have AWS and Azure and that's that.
Even with all their technological excellence, it doesn't matter. That strategy failed, and they're losing.
I'm willing to wait and see how a sales-centric strategy works out.
They've tried to entice technologists so far and it's put them in dead last, by far, versus AWS and Azure. From a business point of view shifting away from technologists to enterprise may be what they need to survive. If nothing else, technologists often don't have much control over the budget versus business leaders.
Sudden changes don't happen when enterprise contracts go years into the future. Google has a much better track record with keeping things stable in the enterprise-cloud world.
Google Maps and Google Cloud are essentially unrelated businesses, with entirely different business models and strategies. Lumping them all together because they share the name "Google" doesn't make sense.
What I was getting at, though, is that if you're a big user of GCloud IaaS products and some of their more basic infrastructual SaaS offerings (Cloud SQL, Bigtable, etc. etc.) you're unlikely to run into the kind of issue you mentioned, and everything from the pricing to the way customer relationships are handled reflects that.
Google Maps is basically an application as a service, which, while technically all part of "cloud", is not really part of the core cloud offering in the same way. On the Cloud Console, Google Maps is listed in the menu at the very bottom, as the only entry under "Other Google Solutions".
All the cloud providers have a mix of offerings that range from very standard (IaaS, or managed open source systems like Cloud SQL and AWS RDS) to very proprietary (things like BigQuery, DynamoDB.) If you decide to use one of the very proprietary ones, you have to recognize that you're creating a very different kind of dependency and risk - migrating to another provider or hosting onprem becomes a rewrite, instead of a migration.
That's a risk you should ideally be aware of before you choose such a solution, and it's not unique to Google. That same level of risk doesn't exist for the other kinds of products I've mentioned, so it doesn't make sense to treat that risk as though it applies to all Google products.
> If nothing else, technologists often don't have much control over the budget versus business leaders.
The business sets the budget and the requirements, but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people.
There's definitely a lag between technical people getting interested in something and that thing getting big in enterprise, but there's still a correlation. Just as there's a inverse when everyone in tech hates a thing and a few years later businesses stop adopting it (see Oracle's slow decline, particularly for new customers).
> but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people.
Have you ever worked at a large enterprise? That's almost never how it goes.
An executive has a meal with a sales person, who says their technology will solve all of the executive's problems, then the executive signs up for a paid trial, and then tells the people that report to them that they are going to implement the thing.
Some better enterprises will cut it off at that point after the technologists come back and say the trial didn't work out, but many enterprises will simply plow forward, either falling to the sunk cost fallacy, or because the executive's friend at another company told them it worked well at the other company.
I would bet that those businesses will tend to die at higher rates, whereas businesses who let technical people have input into technical decisions will survive at higher rates, reconstituting the market over time around companies that make better technical decisions. How quickly, I don't know, but it seems likely that that is not a winning long term strategy for technical decision making.
That used to be the market for AWS. Entice tech startups to use AWS and reap huge benefits as they grow to larger companies and the occasional unicorn.
This is exactly the thing that frustrates me as an agile developer. The enterprise world is more about the position game than it is about the art of creating value. I'm obviously biased. But I think it's a toxic problem and was very much hoping new style businesses like Google are forcing big enterprises to reinvent themselves.
Even in the companies where they do actually care how the trial works out it's usually just "did it work?" and not "is this a good idea?". Often the expensive enterprise product can be made to work with a great deal of effort, and that's good enough to go forward.
As if Google is teetering on the brink? Or are you suggesting they'll just pull the plug on GCS? They very well might. Which, in fact, is probably half the reason companies won't buy what they're selling.
I don't get the allure of AWS, but Azure definitely knows how to hook into Enterprise infrastructure. I don't know what GCP "doesn't have" for the Enterprise.
Sales, support, history of stability in terms of business and pricing, existing relationships, general accessibility and transparency in terms of plans for the future.
They lack absolutely everything that makes a successful enterprise company.
> I don't know what GCP "doesn't have" for the Enterprise.
Customer service. All the way to the CEO/CTO level, where in event a named customer has a problem and fuming at something, the execs show up at customer's site in person to butter the relationship. Never underestimate how important it is to have a high up person with authority to reassign priorities at a vendor do the executive customer service in order to keep and grow enterprise side healthy.
Yeah totally – saying you're going to be more like Oracle actually kicks Google Cloud down a few notches for me. All I hear is "So you're going to be openly hostile and intimidating to your customers since your products never keep up with trends?" instead of what is likely the actual thing: "we have great products, we need a better salesforce to sell those products"
As someone building an Oracle Cloud interface right now, let me say that this is a true statement. The web services are inconsistently named, poorly documented, and some don't really seem production ready. The API is not consistent and in practice I have to use it differently for what seem like similar use cases. On top of that its a mix of Soap and rest in what is a half conversion that may or may not be completed.
He used to work at Oracle, but agreed. Not sure how aware people working for Oracle are of the many developers who dread the company, and I mean from the business side, not so much developers.
Do you think it's generational? People who were young developers back when Oracle was more ubiquitous heard the horror stories, and saw the end parts of how an Oracle contract plays out, which spread the negative reputation across the industry. Folks working in the industry a long time still at least have the good times with Oracle to remember, but as the younger folk move into management positions, they more and more exert their influence to remove Oracle from the conversation due to their bad reputation, perhaps?
I dunno, before Postgres, Oracle was kind of the only game in town for that particular genre of RDBMS. I'm sure you can rattle off a dozen other systems that hit some of the featuresets (or even most), but even today, Oracle is really the most straightforward, in-house scalable RDBMS platform that you can actually hire folks with experience on, isn't it?
It's hard enough finding Postgres SAs these days as it is!
Not really. I get emails occasionally from people looking for PostgreSQL staff.
Generally I try and steer them to either the PostgreSQL jobs mailing list (https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-jobs/), or if they have specific needs then I'll steer them to appropriate people (if known).
Of the people that contact me... some are Weird (not in any positive way). When I ask them how much they're looking to pay (even roughly), they either avoid answering that point, go silent completely, or just do other strange stuff.
Those ones don't get put in contact with anyone. Not sure what they think they're doing, but wasting people's time isn't on.
This assumes a level market with even distribution of information and power. Companies pay as little as they can get away with, not what the job is worth.
He’s talking about sales organizations. He doesn’t care about “technologists” because they don’t make purchasing decisions in most enterprises. He wants to sell more Google Cloud into enterprises.
This is something where Microsoft has done well because it’s always done this and wasn’t too late into cloud. It’s an area Oracle have done well pre-cloud and are late to cloud but hoping like hell to bank on their strong enterprise sales capabilities (doesn’t seem to be working for them though). And it seems to be an area that Amazon have done well due to early mover, being dominant, and with that focusing on building enterprise sales.
Google... I don’t know what they’re doing, they’ve never been an enterprise software company. So he may be into something.
Based on the article, they're not trying to entice technologists with this particular move. They want to go after 'traditional industries' -- Oracle's customers.
> Kurian plans to have Google Cloud ... develop new technology that allows programmers to develop applications that run on all three clouds
As a heavy AWS user, this part actually excites me. Avoiding vendor-lock-in is something I value highly. I would also be a lot more willing to try GCP if I didn't have to invest effort into building a GCP-specific stack. This would also be a huge win for all cloud customers by making the marketplace more competitive.
I can't help myself being sarcastic - to me it looks like Google doesn't really want others to use their great cloud/ML tech, keeping that advantage to themselves, but are pressured by stock market/board etc. so they have to offer it somehow. So the best strategy would be to hire people with deeply dysfunctional mindset acting as repellents of decision makers to keep that unit perpetually underwhelming.
Google and Google Cloud culture is ingrained and very specific. Was in a meeting to move >$10 mill/year in spend over and the account director literally walked out for an hour. The entire process was just insane and ultimately GCP changed negotiated terms at the last minute and lost the business. I would be very careful about trusting them as a sole cloud provider.
I work for a FTSE 100 company and we recently completed a POC on GCP.
The sales guy was/is pushy but tbh the tech is very prescriptive on how things are done, it's the Google way or it doesn't work. That is not how enterprise works, you need to adapt to each customer.
We have lots of AWS and plan on using it more, we might be doing it sub optimally but it works.
To me that sounds like a great way to ensure the least amount of gnashing of teeth for your engineers, your sales team, and your customers.
Either do it right, or don't use us sounds very good.
And if their "doing it right" really is right they'll end up with better outcomes for customers who stick with them, which will drive them ending up with more customers.
I'm using Google Maps platform for various tasks such as geocoding. This article sounds very hostile for indie developers like me. I also hope he doesn't get his hands on Tensorflow - a bit like Oracle got their hands on Java/MySQL and started suing people for various usage of Java.
I think its worth reading the original WSJ article if you can. I can only see the first few lines which are:
> Weeks into his new job as head of Google’s cloud business, Thomas Kurian identified a chief complaint from big business customers: They often didn’t have account managers to call.
Oracle is famous for getting customers to pay, but they were also very good at helping customers with services, advice and customizations. Expensive Consultants worked closely with dev teams. Yes they were expensive, but clients knew they could rely on someone from Oracle fix bugs or give guidance.
Oracle's enterprise support is absolutely fantastic. They will not hesitate to put someone on literally the next plane, fly them to your site, and sit them there until your problem is resolved. Yes, that is expensive, but you're buying peace of mind.
The above does not necessarily apply to bugs and feature requests, just operational support.
(for those wondering: we are being a tad facetious as everyone who has been in the industry a while is familiar with stories of Oracle being litigious, one case specifically being a large and long-running one against Google over Java and Android: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google...)
That's great, but Google seeks to compete with and destroy many users of GCP. I spoke with a pharma CEO who, having no background in cloud, said straightforwardly that he would never even consider letting workloads onto GCP. Google as a business can't be trusted. It's like FedEx deciding to make widgets after seeing how many widgets get shipped. Oracle never did that. Google does it all the time.
As a Google Cloud customer, I really hope that he doesn't take the "bad bits" – raising prices, unnecessary lock-in, slow moving technology, litigation. As an engineer in a team where engineers lead decisions like which cloud provider to use, rather than some exec on the golf course, I hope they keep their appeal to those customers who don't want to play the enterprise sales game.