> a way for Google to secure a beachhead in half the Fortune 100
If that is their objective, they will fail again, since this is the land of good account management. Being able to call somebody on the phone if required. Something AWS excels on, Microsoft a little bit, while Google is rumored to have humans working there, but they are rarely seen.
We have a relatively modest commit with GCP, around $1M a year, and have a dedicated account rep who I can contact whenever I need to. In fact, we've had a similar relationship even when we were half the size.
Google simply does not have a culture of giving a shit about people's experiences with their product. If you are having a problem you better either have that problem so frequently and severely that it shows up on whatever monitoring system they're using to evaluate release health, or you better get comfortable with it for the long haul.
This is such an underrated weakness of Google. When I was working at AWS ProServe, we never even took GCP as a serious competitor. Their customer service, acount management and enterprise sales team was so horrendous it was laughable.
I don’t think we even had talking points about why AWS was better than GCP like we did Azure.
what drives me mad is that it's not even underrated! everyone knows, everyone has been talking (and complaning) about this for something like 15 years!
I personally know of 2 big GCP customers who, over the years, left GCP because of this and the impact it had in critical situations. This very feedback was given in both cases to people considerably high up on GCP's ladder and... nothing's ever changed.
I'm sure plenty other big migrations off GCP provided the same feedback, to no avail.
When Diane Greene first and then Thomas Kurian became Google Cloud CEOs people thought that finally, due to their previous experiences in very Enterprise-aggressive companies, they would improve massively on that front.
Did they improve the situation? a bit. Massively? bringing GCP finally on-par with anyone else (not better than anyone else, just... the same)? nope, not even close.
Google is, at its core, an advertising company that tries to disguise itself as a technology company. When necessity calls, they will undoubtedly elect to divert resources towards their core business and away from their hobby projects (which GCP is).
I think you'd be quite surprised by how big it is inside Google. & Kurian won himself a lot of favor when Cloud figured out how to make sure it became profitable in Q2? 2023.
It was the last Google organization to have a genuine sustained hiring spree and didn't face nearly the same amount of cutbacks
If that is their objective, they will fail again, since this is the land of good account management. Being able to call somebody on the phone if required. Something AWS excels on, Microsoft a little bit, while Google is rumored to have humans working there, but they are rarely seen.