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by JumpCrisscross 1159 days ago
Google Cloud “is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding” [1].

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

2 comments

I work at Google so am perhaps biased, but that article is from 2019 and cloud is now a 20B/yr business and growing. Why does it keep coming up?
Because Google no longer knows how to do customer/developer engagement just as it goes into things that require it more?

It doesn't help that it allows others to push opinion pieces in media that build up memes against its products (I honestly believe it's non-trivial part of what killed Google+ - at some point someone believed at Google about it being "ghost town" and started making it more FB-like and pushing "new people to observe" at you, making it less and less usable).

The infamous "will kill your account on basis of unaccountable algorithm and you can't do anything about it" is another big issue when trying to get clients on GCP. I honestly find GCP to be the best cloud I can use when not going full hog on things like AWS-specific services, yet there's always the fear that Google will just kill the account, possibly shuttering the business.

> there's always the fear that Google will just kill the account, possibly shuttering the business.

I get that feeling sometimes about my Gmail account.

If I do get deleted by the algorithm, then I feel the only way I will get support is by posting it on hackernews.

Presumably because the article linked above says that the rumoured deadline for gaining sufficient market share is this year? Also, yes revenues have been growing, but is GCP profitable after all this time? As you point out, it's been 4 years since that article was published.
Is it profitable? Anyone can sell cloud services for 1$ and lose money on every dollar.

Keep doing that long enough, and still be behind AWS by 4x, and you’ll get your plug pulled.

IIRC, because Google is the only major cloud provider that made such statement.
They didn't though? The source is a single article claiming to have spoken to insiders, which was subsequently denied and never confirmed.
There’s a bias here for AWS because they were the early adopter product and have traction with startups.

I think Google is more creative on the business side with GCP and is doing well in the market in a lot of ways. AWS does the circa 1985 “Hi, we’re IBM, fuck you” thing.

Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals. Few of the types of people who post here understand it.

> Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals

The kind crafted by competent sales teams in it for the long haul. Not the rotating cast of characters at Google.

Lol. Those account managers these days get purged pretty quickly. MS isn’t Oracle, but it isn’t 2003 either.

“It would be a shame if those O365 E5 went up 30%. How about you buy 50% of your spend on these credits that fell off the truck, and we can forget about that?”

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