Okay, and now the Google / Alphabet / @gcpcloud earnings call. We start with Sonatina, Op. 100 as hold music.
All Google has to do is stall for 30 minutes until the Amazon call and all the analysts will drop like flies.
10K people listening now. We'll see how that plummets when the Amazon call starts.
It's notable that @sundarpichai always makes the time to attend these calls. Many CEOs don't, choosing instead to delegate them to other execs.
Talking about a bunch of things that aren't @gcpcloud so I zone out and begin sketching out how I'd fix Google's cloud marketing challenges.
"Servers will be the primary drivers of spend." Okay, there's the GCP bits.
And "we see a large TAM ahead" is either talking about Total Addressable Market or a very large customer-facing engineer. And that's all we've got time for today, as Amazon news ate Google's earnings lunch. Onward!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
So story time! We optimize AWS bills-and sometimes that includes negotiating @awscloud contracts on behalf of our customers. This is a deeply held secret unless you Google for "aws contract negotiation."
An @awscloud account manager for one of our customers rotated out onto a different account because it had been 20 minutes or whatever, and we randomly encountered them on a new customer six months later.
"Hey, it's great to be working with you folks again!" they gushed. "Oh hey, while I've got your attention, quick question. Do you know anyone who negotiates @awscloud contracts? I have a customer asking."
The entire reason we didn’t take VC money for the Duckbill group is that we would be pushed to capture as much revenue as possible, as quickly as possible. And the customers lose in that scenario.
Seeking growth and scale at all costs creates situations for bad outcomes for customers, like one-size-fits-all algorithms and automation that doesn’t take into account the customer’s specific goals, architecture, constraints—and their own customers.
“You’re spending $150 million a year on @awscloud? Cool, we’ll knock hilarious amounts off of that for a flat fee that’s less than one engineer’s annual salary.”
VCs would demand a percentage pricing model, and then the whole thing goes to custard.
I've been critical of the @FinOpsFdn for a while but apparently not so critical that they were too ashamed to release "The 2021 State of FinOps Report."
You may follow along with this thread via data.finops.org if it's still online by the time I get done.
First we--wait. *math math math* Did... did they just add together all of their respondents' numbers and not de-duplicate "folks who work at the same company?"
Aren't these people supposed to be good at a thing that requires exactly this?
I mean... get six respondents from a giant AWS customer like Netflix, CapitalOne, etc. and suddenly you can change the entire shape of the survey!
Data transfer pricing at scale, makes networking people feel at home, more deterministic performance, and you can blame it when you want to go take a nap in the data center.
2. Strongly consider the effectiveness of the current messaging to AWS partners of "yes we'll compete with you but don't worry because we're really really bad at anything above a certain point in the stack."
And now the Amazon Q4 results. Hmm, net sales are up, operating income is flat, and "we're not a PowerPoint company" is increasingly sounding like an excuse.
Talking about a lot of Amazon stuff. I really wish they had a cloud-specific earnings call so I could ignore the rest.
Boasting about reInvent and how rapidly @awscloud innovates. 180 releases over the three week span because someone over there HATES me.