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Thread on my personal view why Google does not do well in cloud: It is mostly a failure of communication - both in the sense of “listening” and in the sense of “explaining”. To understand this, some history:
Google has built a backend infrastructure second to none. Bigtable, Dremel, Spanner etc. - and of course Borg. But for a long time, G saw things like Borg as “secret sauce”, so it was not explained very well. You can look at App Engine as the original “serverless”, and Borg ...
... as containerization before everybody else. Google never explained why AppEngine was weird to customers, so they just looked at it and puzzled. Amazon gave them VMs, which customers understood and loved.
Large cloud workloads require rethinking the way you do computing, and Google was culturally never very good to take customers by the hand and help them with business problems. Tech support or really anything that involves talking to the outside was never a forté.
In a similar vein, G is not renowned for *listening* to customers either. “Legacy” businesses almost always run access control via Active Directory, so migrating services to the cloud requires good integration with AD. The reason Azure eats Gs lunch for older businesses is ...
... Microsoft’s ability to understand and accommodate the legacy constraints of existing enterprises.
I view Kurians appointment as the result of a misjudgement: G obviously thinks they need to “sell harder”; my personal view is that G really needs to become better at ...
I view Kurians appointment as the result of a misjudgement: G obviously thinks they need to “sell harder”; my personal view is that G really needs to become better at ...
... listening, understanding, and explaining.
