[princetman]

That’s a little harsh. I mean hindsight is always 20-20. Under her leadership Google Cloud did acquire big name customers. Google’s struggle to gain foothold in enterprises and reasons are well discussed on various HN threads over years. It’s a lot to expect from one executive to turn it around in face of fierce competition.

[shanghaiaway]

No, that's exactly what should be expected from a CEO.

[princetman]

And she did deliver, a lot[0].

After Diane took over the reins, Google Cloud managed to get solid enterprise wins. 20th Century Fox, Colgate, Disney, eBay, HSBC, LATAM Airlines, LG CNS, The Home Depot, The New York Times, Schlumberger, Target and Verizon are some of the key enterprises using Google Cloud.

The most notable win for Google Cloud came from Twitter which has moved large-scale Hadoop clusters to GCP, with a total of about 300 PB of data migrated.

Netflix, a loyal AWS customer, is using Google Cloud Platform for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Google Cloud made impressive progress in establishing itself as an enterprise cloud platform.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-...

[kenhwang]

I work for one of those listed "key enterprises". Google Cloud spend is <1/10000th of what we spend on AWS. Google Cloud is used to pressure AWS to build features and negotiate pricing. Nothing critical runs on there, just some POCs and emergency failovers. I believe our Azure use also eclipses our Google use.

When you're mega enterprise sized, you pretty much use every cloud provider and service, but they're nowhere near equally used.

[paganel]

She should of at least help Google Cloud out-compete Microsoft, which apparently they didn't. And I can partially see why, because in the market where I'm located (Eastern-Europe, a reasonably well-developed IT market) MS has become very, very aggressive in selling Azure, it has been that way for the last 3 years (I'd say), for them it's "sell Azure first and then everything else will follow", while I haven't even heard of Google Cloud being mentioned as a cloud alternative because their sales people are missing. For the record I know people who sell IT solutions for both enterprise and Government entities.

Maybe in the States or in other parts of Europe the situation is different and Google does indeed push their cloud solution down clients' throats but over-here they're absent.

[princetman]

People underestimate Microsoft’s clout. Microsoft has massive enterprise distribution network[0] and “Microsoft Certified Partners”. Basically there are technical consultants who goes around recommending MS offerings to their clients while collecting commissions from MS. It worked for Office, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, and now it’s working for Azure as well.

Google Cloud is new vendor & it’s very unlikely that they’ll surpass MS anytime soon.

Microsoft collected $9.5 billion in Azure cloud revenue in 2018, vs. $1.6 billion for the comparable Google business, according to investment bank KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. Next year, KeyBanc forecasts, it’ll be $15.1 billion for Microsoft, $3.2 billion for Google. Of course, in a market expected to top $40 billion next year, third place in the U.S. isn’t so bad. Still, “Google is way back,” says Brent Bracelin, an analyst at KeyBanc who co-authored the report. “They don’t have enterprise sales distribution,” he says. “That’s their big Achilles’ heel. Microsoft has a massive footprint there.”

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/google-ma...

[user5994461]

Azure is somewhere between 2 and 4 times as expensive as Google cloud. If you stop doing a stupid revenues comparison like all articles are doing and factor that pricing difference, then you will realize that google is more successful.

[vukk]

Europe a separate discussion from the US, as far as I know the problem is that Google refuses to sign any kind of guarantees that the data doesn't leave the EU. Probably because hosting companies that have US DCs can be compelled to give up data from EU datacenters too by the USgovt.

Microsoft does give those guarantees, it has a weird setup with Deutsche Telekom operating their datacenters.

So institutions like universities can't necessarily use Google cloud services. Even consultancies aren't necessarily so hot on providing Google cloud stuff, as some customers can't use them. All this, however, is anecdotal.

You can read more on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16858597

[Macacity]

Yes, but this setup with Deutsche Telekom will end in 2019 and does not accept new customers.

[draw_down]

To quote Don Draper, that’s what the money is for.

[lawnchair_larry]

FYI, 90% of your comments are insta-dead and invisible to most users since Nov 2017. I’m not sure why a few of them are allowed through. The 3 you posted after this one were all dead, so I had to go back this far to reply.