Diane Greene is and never was a good executive to lead an enterprise business. She is more of a technologist/scientist and better at small/medium sized businesses.
She built VMware which was a great technology but stupidly sold to EMC for $60M, leaving a lot of money on the table. EMC rightly fired her because she couldn’t scale and replaced her with Paul Maritz who was more suitable for this job.
The idea that she could handle a large and diverse org like GCP was a gamble at best, and it looks like it lost, again.
I'm not sure I agree, at least not for the reasons stated.
There are many reasons why VM might have sold for what it did and 'money' is only part of the equation. She would not have made the decision alone, there'd be good bankers and investors at the table, who'd have some insight if it was a 'stupid' move.
Greene might have been a great choice for Google if Google were ready for it.
It seems there was an existential struggle over some issues, particularly the Military Contract thing. I feel sorry for both Sundar and Diane because it's a very tough one: there are ethnical issues, but also cultural and brand. If a good chunk of G staff really don't want to have military contracts ... well it's going to be a problem. That said, some people might feel the opposite (!), i.e. America may have issues but ultimately is a force for 'good' or at least they provide the safe, open and fair means literally for Google to exist. I'm not making arguments here, just pointing to how thorny that one is.
And of course trying to change culture (Enterprise Sales, Customer Orientation, Service and Support) to a company that has none of that ... is going to be hard.
AWS and MS are infinitely more suited to it.
It may very well be a better decision for G Cloud to simply carve out a piece of the cloud that suits their natural advantages and dynamics, as opposed to trying to appease GM, Mondelez and Barclay's IT teams.
> America may have issues but ultimately is a force for 'good' or at least they provide the safe, open and fair means literally for Google to exist. I'm not making arguments here, just pointing to how thorny that one is.
You're making a statement. You are saying "America is ultimately a force for good". America is definitely a force for the good of a certain set of humans. Whether it is a force for the good of the world (ie: the full set of humans on the planet) is certainly very questionable, especially in recent years.
I specifically said 'some people may feel the opposite i.e. America is a force for good'.
I'm not making a statement, I'm indicating that some may feel the opposite of the much touted group of G staff who don't want to do Mil Contracts.
To be clear, I do think America is a force for good ... but still not sure if G should work on Mil contracts, I think it depends on the case. Intelligence gathering, AI in general, maybe communications, but I certainly wouldn't be supportive of designing weapons systems, or imagine things like 'first strike Nuclear weapons capabilities'. I don't think the line is arbitrary. I respect that everyone has feelings about that so my point is: it's tough for Sundar and Diane.
That’s a little harsh. I mean hindsight is always 20-20. Under her leadership Google Cloud did acquire big name customers. Google’s struggle to gain foothold in enterprises and reasons are well discussed on various HN threads over years. It’s a lot to expect from one executive to turn it around in face of fierce competition.
After Diane took over the reins, Google Cloud managed to get solid enterprise wins. 20th Century Fox, Colgate, Disney, eBay, HSBC, LATAM Airlines, LG CNS, The Home Depot, The New York Times, Schlumberger, Target and Verizon are some of the key enterprises using Google Cloud.
The most notable win for Google Cloud came from Twitter which has moved large-scale Hadoop clusters to GCP, with a total of about 300 PB of data migrated.
Netflix, a loyal AWS customer, is using Google Cloud Platform for disaster recovery and business continuity.
Google Cloud made impressive progress in establishing itself as an enterprise cloud platform.
I work for one of those listed "key enterprises". Google Cloud spend is <1/10000th of what we spend on AWS. Google Cloud is used to pressure AWS to build features and negotiate pricing. Nothing critical runs on there, just some POCs and emergency failovers. I believe our Azure use also eclipses our Google use.
When you're mega enterprise sized, you pretty much use every cloud provider and service, but they're nowhere near equally used.
She should of at least help Google Cloud out-compete Microsoft, which apparently they didn't. And I can partially see why, because in the market where I'm located (Eastern-Europe, a reasonably well-developed IT market) MS has become very, very aggressive in selling Azure, it has been that way for the last 3 years (I'd say), for them it's "sell Azure first and then everything else will follow", while I haven't even heard of Google Cloud being mentioned as a cloud alternative because their sales people are missing. For the record I know people who sell IT solutions for both enterprise and Government entities.
Maybe in the States or in other parts of Europe the situation is different and Google does indeed push their cloud solution down clients' throats but over-here they're absent.
People underestimate Microsoft’s clout. Microsoft has massive enterprise distribution network[0] and “Microsoft Certified Partners”. Basically there are technical consultants who goes around recommending MS offerings to their clients while collecting commissions from MS. It worked for Office, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, and now it’s working for Azure as well.
Google Cloud is new vendor & it’s very unlikely that they’ll surpass MS anytime soon.
Microsoft collected $9.5 billion in Azure cloud revenue in 2018, vs. $1.6 billion for the comparable Google business, according to investment bank KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. Next year, KeyBanc forecasts, it’ll be $15.1 billion for Microsoft, $3.2 billion for Google. Of course, in a market expected to top $40 billion next year, third place in the U.S. isn’t so bad. Still, “Google is way back,” says Brent Bracelin, an analyst at KeyBanc who co-authored the report. “They don’t have enterprise sales distribution,” he says. “That’s their big Achilles’ heel. Microsoft has a massive footprint there.”
Azure is somewhere between 2 and 4 times as expensive as Google cloud. If you stop doing a stupid revenues comparison like all articles are doing and factor that pricing difference, then you will realize that google is more successful.
Europe a separate discussion from the US, as far as I know the problem is that Google refuses to sign any kind of guarantees that the data doesn't leave the EU. Probably because hosting companies that have US DCs can be compelled to give up data from EU datacenters too by the USgovt.
Microsoft does give those guarantees, it has a weird setup with Deutsche Telekom operating their datacenters.
So institutions like universities can't necessarily use Google cloud services. Even consultancies aren't necessarily so hot on providing Google cloud stuff, as some customers can't use them. All this, however, is anecdotal.
FYI, 90% of your comments are insta-dead and invisible to most users since Nov 2017. I’m not sure why a few of them are allowed through. The 3 you posted after this one were all dead, so I had to go back this far to reply.
Um, VMWare sold in 2003 for USD$635m. Add nearly 15 years worth of inflation (plus current tech hype) and I’d say that was very much a successful “unicorn”. They were just recovering from the dot come bubble then. So valuations weren’t as lofty as many have been in recent years.
She built VMware which was a great technology but stupidly sold to EMC for $60M, leaving a lot of money on the table. EMC rightly fired her because she couldn’t scale and replaced her with Paul Maritz who was more suitable for this job.
The idea that she could handle a large and diverse org like GCP was a gamble at best, and it looks like it lost, again.