Aarschotdachaubucha t1_je9e4dk wrote on March 30, 2023 at 11:27 AM

Reply to comment by brnape in ‘Microsoft has a very anti-competitive posture in cloud,’ accuses Google by marketrent

Google is watching its cloud play disintegrate because its cloud is shit. They tried to give services away for years subsidized by their ad money. It's no different than Azure or AWS business models. However, the former has a walled garden of incomprehensible Windows admin shit that is 30 years old to force people to use the Windows cloud, and the other has a powerful first mover advantage that ate a large retail logistics company's entire net revenue for years before profiting.

Google squandered its runway launching and murdering products it couldn't sell ads on. The companies I worked with that used GCP left it as soon as their free terms expired. They were watching features get canned inexplicably or suffer production breaking changes by the same tech culture that kills the rest of their ad-free products.

zodiacsnake t1_jea68gr wrote on March 30, 2023 at 3:15 PM

It does make you wonder how an online bookstore ended up being one of the biggest players in cloud computing

Aarschotdachaubucha t1_jea6lrf wrote on March 30, 2023 at 3:17 PM

Being a giant logistics company means you need a very large inventory management system and an even larger POS website. They got tired of capacity planning meetings for data center infrastructure, and needed to find something to do with spare capacity that they needed two years from now, but would take 3 years to grow into.

Hence computer rentals on the Internet were born.

TheGrif7 t1_jebh3bf wrote on March 30, 2023 at 8:16 PM

I mean as an admin I tend to agree about the incomprehensibly of azure ad and the 29 other control panels Microsoft asks admins to manage. I will say that while the UI is shit, the vertical integration of an all windows environment is very useful for businesses looking to move away from managing hardware, no one else has an offering that comes close. Apple does the same thing in the consumer space and no one ever seems to care. Google's cloud is dogshit though, I've managed workspace tenants and it's so much worse than even Microsoft. Google's documentation is as likely to lie as to tell the truth, and their support is useless.