Like Valve they have created products that took over the whole space.
They have a tendency to completely drop things when they don't pick up traction early enough. (artifact, everything Google)
There used to be a Halo around both companies in the 2000s, that was slowly eroded in the 2010s.
They suck at communicating.
They create good products that never see the light of day again (Portal, l4D,Half Life) because their main product (steam, ads) makes so much more money.
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GCP has the same problem as Artifact, where Google bull headedly tries to enter a different type of product/business model (b2b, instead of b2c) without adopting any of the cultural must-haves of a b2c company. (customer before product, service, reliability over speed)
Tensorflowv2 is failing due to a similar kind of stubbornness.
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The scary thing is, if Google manages to pull off the culture change (unlikely), I can see them sweeping both AWS and Azure in the cloud space.
I think implicit in this myopia is they don't eat their own dogfood. If they have their best people managing their core products running their own infrastructure which is clearly much more reliable than GCP, then GCP won't get better. On top of which their best people will move toward their own internal services.
Contrast this with the other cloud providers who seem to be using their own clouds for their primary services creating a feedback loop which ensures they don't have the big outages that GCP has had over the past year.
Dogfooding usually helps with usability. I'm not sure it has much to do with big outages; GCP is big enough that all the individual decisionmakers are pretty maximally incentivized not to break it.
I know I'm nit-picking, but what's wrong with Valve's handling of Portal? It is a highly-successful franchise that continues to pay dividends for them with no further investment on their part, if I understand correctly.
Not every game needs a sequel. I agree that a smaller company would have been economically forced into milking the franchise, but that doesn't imply milking the franchise is universally a good thing.
Meanwhile, perpetual testing initiative was a great solution for keeping the game active without requiring active investment from Valve's game developers.
I agree with you in principle, but in this case, Valve hurt themselves by not releasing more games. If they released more sequels to Portal and Half Life, would Epic have released a Steam competitor? Right now, Steam has dwindled to a craigslist-like marketplace of garbage. So just like Nintendo has to release AAA games to keep the Nintendo Switch alive, Valve also has to release AAA games to keep Steam alive.
Like Valve they have created products that took over the whole space.
They have a tendency to completely drop things when they don't pick up traction early enough. (artifact, everything Google)
There used to be a Halo around both companies in the 2000s, that was slowly eroded in the 2010s.
They suck at communicating.
They create good products that never see the light of day again (Portal, l4D,Half Life) because their main product (steam, ads) makes so much more money.
________
GCP has the same problem as Artifact, where Google bull headedly tries to enter a different type of product/business model (b2b, instead of b2c) without adopting any of the cultural must-haves of a b2c company. (customer before product, service, reliability over speed)
Tensorflowv2 is failing due to a similar kind of stubbornness.
_______________
The scary thing is, if Google manages to pull off the culture change (unlikely), I can see them sweeping both AWS and Azure in the cloud space.