[Bias disclaimer: I have worked at both Microsoft and Google]
Google Cloud is different from Google. Cloud is where Google is learning the hard way that being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses. This whole article struck a deep chord from me - in fact, I've given the exact same answer to countless interview candidates when asked about companies I've worked at that Google gives ICs far more leeway to decide what they build compared to other companies who are very top-down.
Google culture, in my personal opinion, struggles with enterprise sales and the customer support, long-term stability, and overall business plans it takes to attract enterprise users, convince them to use your product, and convince them that you're serious about supporting the things they care about. This is quite obvious when you compare them to a Microsoft or an Oracle. Cloud is the first major business group that has had to come to terms with this, and they've taken several steps to address this. Some people have complained that the culture in Google cloud isn't the same as in Google at large and that it feels more like certain other companies, but what they miss is that this is absolutely essential, and if you tried to run a cloud compute product with the traditional Google model it would (in my opinion) fail miserably.
"being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses"
Cannot upvote hard enough. I have had to work with several Google PMs and SWEs on large contracts for different companies. They all talk down to you, think you're confused, and if you ask for a feature to reduce costs it's always: "that'll take 6 months, but here's the solution we like and you should try it and it's really cheap (and no we definitely don't want to lock you in of course)".
Being Googley is a lot about Googlers satisfying their own curiosities and performing well against their own metrics that they define. Sometimes that's correlated with what the customers actually need and want. Other times, it's really not, and as a customer you should fire your Googler. Don't worry they'll still find a way to keep themselves entertained.
I recently did interview loops at both Azure and GCP and the difference between the people were astounding.
While Google takes way too long to make a hiring decision, all of the people I talked to seemed intelligent and very thoughtful. I did a Microsoft 'hiring event' and holy hell it was a clusterfuck. I got ghosted by one manager, another was extremely disinterested and seemed like they were interviewing me to check a box.
Another asked an algorithmic coding question they themselves did not understand, I had to very politely argue with them, I ended up having to show them step by step how my solution was correct (much to their surprised amazement). The system design interview was done by someone who clearly doesn't understand system design.
I cannot emphasize enough how much their engineering leads came across like a joke compared to other companies. Maybe I just got really unlucky and there are good people who work there, but I'm a bit frightened by what I saw.
Worked at Google Cloud a while ago and GitHub (Codespaces, which is built on Azure), I couldn't agree more. Google Cloud is so technically and operationally superior, and the average engineer quality was _much_ higher. The obvious downside is that because the bar for GA is so high (because everyone is, or is trying to be, clever), everything lives in beta forever and you can't ship anything on any reasonable scheduke.
Google and Azure are both just light-years behind AWS , having worked on and with all three platforms and dealt with engineering staff all the way through.
Google doesn't really build things for other engineers, hiding important details of system operation. Azure resources just don't spin up.
AWS docs are a byzantine nightmare sometimes, but everything that's in the documentation works exactly as it says it does, and it doesn't go out of its way to go "look over there" when a mode of operation has downstream implications.
From what I've seen of Azure as a customer, the quality sucks and it's impossible to convince them to plug gaps no matter how trivial to fix and how obvious. Meanwhile I've had at least one ticket become a permanent fix in AWS almost without asking.
However...
I just switched back to AWS and it's like stepping back in time from Azure.
The AWS Console structure, layout, and organisation is their internal corporate structure.
The Azure Portal is designed to reflect your corporate structure, not Microsoft's.
With AWS if I have some VMs, associated S3 buckets, and an RDS database, I have to click around a bunch of different web portals to find them all! Unrelated resources are all blended to together into flat lists with gibberish internal system-generated names.
It's like clicking through the tables of a SQL database instead of using the actual client application.
In Azure, everything is nicely organised into Resource Groups. The VMs, storage, load balancers, databases, etc... all together. Everything is shown with display names instead of IDs, and all their individual consoles are (mostly) consistent. Logs, RBAC, etc... are generally all in the same place and work the same way.
>I did a Microsoft 'hiring event' and holy hell it was a clusterfuck.
Microsoft's recruitment process is notoriously woeful. I wouldn't have believed half the things I've heard only it happened to a friend of mine. The interviewers never showed up to the interview, and terminated his job application when he told them the rescheduled date for the interview wasn't suitable.
That’s an interesting angle, how ones B2B dedication and competencies align with business customers who have a lot on the line vs flippant and irritated end consumers playing with free products. The stakes are definitely not equal there.
In case anyone from the Photos team sees this: Photos is the reason I still use a personal Google account, and I pay for Google One. It just works. Everytime I notice a change, it seems like it tangibly benefits me. When I don't notice a change, everything is smooth, fast, and easy.
What Google also misses in terms of B2B is the non-technical side of keeping your clients close (or, more to the point in Google's case, to get said clients in the first place).
Google somehow still thinks that business clients will flock to them just because they're called Google. That's not how it works, you have to keep close personal relationships with said business clients. If that means having a heavy-alcohol infused night out in some expensive resort with the CTOs (or the CTO-equivalents) of some of those potential clients then that's the way do it. To say nothing of the government clients, who come with their own idiosyncrasies.
> ...if you tried to run a cloud compute product with the traditional Google model it would (in my opinion) fail miserably.
Google does sell G Workspace to enterprises? YouTube also seems to do well with enterprise-y stuff involving the Movie and Music industry, as another example.
GCP is all-enterprise zero-consumer, sure. But: GCP's got execs from SAP and Oracle at helm, and I believe, it is a problem that, over the shorter-term, they can throw money at (by hiring execs from Dell / Oracle / Cisco / HP / IBM / Qualcomm, as at that scale of spend, enterprise sales is mostly a game of who knows who).
Back the day Google salesman would drop in like and say “hey, we’re from Google, perhaps you’ve heard of us”. Seemed like their primary gig was apologizing for the death of the Google Search Appliance. They weren’t very empowered - on one project that I worked on, the sales-dude had so little juice that the SE put stuff on his credit card to do a demo.
Now, they seem to have a solid enterprise sales team. The only weak point is they rely a lot on the channel partners. Usually that’s fine, but I prefer one throat to choke.
> Cloud is where Google is learning the hard way that being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses.
I can't speak for Google, or about what Googley is. But I have worked a decade in the Danish public sector, and now for around a year in European Green Energy, and I think there is just a massive difference between Google and Amazon in this regard.
Denmark is one of the most digitized countries in the world, and I was there for the transition from self-hosted iron in the basement, to renting space for your iron in dedicated server farms, to going full Azure. Azure was/is the logical way to go for a lot of European Enterprise organisations because it hooks so nicely into the Microsoft infrastructure you undoubtedly already have. There is no real alternative to Microsoft Office in Denmark, Google Docs could (maybe should) have been, but I'll get to that later, and once you're buying the Office365 package as well as Windows licenses, you're going to have massive savings by going with Azure rather than AWS. This is partly because we don't buy licenses directly from Microsoft, but through partners and because Microsoft has some of the best B2B support in the world. I know Microsoft gets a lot of hate here on HN, and maybe rightly so, but it's by far the best tech company I've ever dealt with from a non-tech enterprise perspective. When team was rolled out, it was turned on for users automatically, which is a big no-no in Enterprise IT, but within an hour of it happening Microsoft had given us a custom hack to turn it off in our setup. Not long after, probably because the entire world of Enterprise was on the phone with Microsoft, it was off by default. But compare that sort of support level to Google, where you can talk with an automated form... Google will lose so hard that it's not even considered an option.
Amazon and Google were interesting in this regard. Because the where Google didn't really do anything, Amazon quickly realized that they couldn't sell AWS to Enterprise organisations if they didn't compete with Microsoft on support. Because that's sort of what you sell to the IT department in Enterprise Organisations. One thing is the product, the other thing is the ability for the CTO to tell the organisation that they are on the phone with Microsoft/Amazon headquarters and getting hourly updates when something goes wrong. That's of massive value, and Google doesn't do this. Amazon similarly didn't comply with the GDPR as fast as Microsoft. At first it seemed like Amazon didn't really think it mattered to them, and that we would still pick their cloud products, but it didn't last very long, and within a year, they became more compliant than Microsoft. I remember it well, because we had a few things in AWS at the time, and we needed to help filling out some "red-tape" and Amazons reply was basically "kindly fuck off", and then out of the blue 3 months later, we suddenly had a Danish AWS representative and free legal counseling from one of our major EU focused lawfirms contact us to help us get it done right.
Google didn't do anything like that. They sort of try in Education, but we're currently well into a big chromebook + Google Education and school start "scandal" of sorts here in Denmark. Because one of our cities failed to pass the national GDPR requirements and were basically forbidden from using Google Education at the start of the school year back in july (the school year starts in august). This didn't exactly happen, because it turned out they couldn't start the school year and that parents care more about education than whether or not Google snoop on the schoolwork or not. It was also sort of silly because it was just one municipality out of 98 that were forbidden from using Google Education and chromebooks and there are a lot of other municipalities that also use it. Anyway, that is sort of unrelated to what I want to use the example for, because the interesting part to me is how Google hasn't really solved the issue.
Google Education and Chromebooks are a massive business by Danish standards. The Public Sector is the biggest spender on IT, and if you can secure just half of the schools in the country for Google Education, that's one of the biggest opportunities for IT sales you can get here in Denmark. And Google hasn't bothered solved this issue? I think the very likely outcome is that all the schools are going to switch to Microsoft and Office365 and run Linux on their Chromebooks in the coming years because of this. I think this because Google isn't the first company to fumble the ball on Education. Apple did it first, and where almost every school used Apple products a decade ago, now they use none. Apple's problems weren't GDPR problems, the GDPR didn't exist back then but we did have national privacy laws and they were in perfect compliance with those. Apples issue was instead that their products didn't integrate into Enterprise IT policies, and since they didn't want to offer support or change ways, they were slowly rolled out and replaced by companies that did.
I think this may have been fine for Apple. They don't seem to be big on B2B sales, but for Google it's just so strange.
Google Cloud is different from Google. Cloud is where Google is learning the hard way that being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses. This whole article struck a deep chord from me - in fact, I've given the exact same answer to countless interview candidates when asked about companies I've worked at that Google gives ICs far more leeway to decide what they build compared to other companies who are very top-down.
Google culture, in my personal opinion, struggles with enterprise sales and the customer support, long-term stability, and overall business plans it takes to attract enterprise users, convince them to use your product, and convince them that you're serious about supporting the things they care about. This is quite obvious when you compare them to a Microsoft or an Oracle. Cloud is the first major business group that has had to come to terms with this, and they've taken several steps to address this. Some people have complained that the culture in Google cloud isn't the same as in Google at large and that it feels more like certain other companies, but what they miss is that this is absolutely essential, and if you tried to run a cloud compute product with the traditional Google model it would (in my opinion) fail miserably.