Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Google was the natural “winner” of the cloud computing game.

Google has internet in its DNA it never did anything else but internet.

But it failed to see the opportunity in the first place.

Secondly I attribute its lack of customer service to its recruiting and hiring practice.... it only ever hired the most geeky of geeky academics.

And geeky academics are the opposite of human relationship oriented.

Thus everyone at google designed the company to avoid human contact.

And that surely the complete opposite of customer service.

Google has the inverse of good customer service DNA... it has “hide from and avoid customer contact” DNA.

And that’s what has sunk the google cloud. $10B might sound like a lot, but to me it sounds like a gigantic fail.




I agree, Google is not enterprise focused as far as I can tell. Microsoft is and that why Azure has been able to do so well so quickly.

It's impressive to me that Amazon was able to shift focus to AWS without much existing presence in enterprise tech stacks.


Steve Yegge's classic platforms rant gives some insight into why Amazon was ready for the cloud: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611


I find that impressive too - completely different to its core business. Totally flies in the face of any advice to stick with the business you know.


Amazon getting into on demand hosting early is in it's DNA. If you look at them as a business that grew up on earning profits on very small margins. And that early on demand hosting was pretty low margin, that in their case also let them offset some risk of building data centers earlier than they would have otherwise.


Interesting viewpoint - also achieving profit through massive scale is their DNA as well I would say.

Still though, enterprise is a tough domain in my experience, AWS did a great job


Bezos graduated summa cum laude electrical engineering and computer science and then had a fair part in building out Amazon's own infrastructure. He probably knew that stuff quite well even if it was only a support to the core business.


The difference between AWS and Gcloud is the ability to have a human conversation 1 click away. Shouldn't be that hard to replicate for Google.


I suspect a certain book retailer also didn't see the opportunuty in the first place.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: