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.
