points by cyberax 13 hours ago | 0 comments
GCP is a joke. Their sales reps are useless, and their customer support is non-existent. They are about 8% of the cloud computing marketshare as a result.
I hate Azure, but Microsoft is at least trying to sell it properly. You get a human you can talk to and their support is responsive (although it's also useless).
> Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.
[–] whakim 9 hours ago
[–] shadowgovt 13 hours ago
Most of the improvements have been keeping it running in the face of being the place everyone stores and retrieves video, and that's a lot of invisible work (but is the real reason you don't really see working YouTube competitors; it's a technically challenging big-iron problem).
[–] WarmWash 12 hours ago
The knife in the back of Youtube competitors is that people ad-block because they don't like ads, not because they have some kind of moral compass. Youtube mostly tolerates ad-blocking, which pretty much cements it in place as the absolute best streaming service (no ads, no subscription, unlimited free consumption).
The result is that it's basically impossible to get off the ground to compete with yt, because early adopters are almost universally tech forward. And tech forward people don't pay for shit (except the 1-5% who do).
This is an outdated or straight-up incorrect take. In the past quarter, Google Cloud's revenue was ~$30B, just shy of Azure (~$33B) and well shy of AWS (~$45B). That's about 28% of the cloud computing market excluding other players. Additionally, Google Cloud has grown a lot over the past few years and has been steadily eating away at AWS and Azure's market share; by next year it seems likely that it'll be bigger than Azure.
> As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.
Sure, it's a website that serves videos (and ads); just because the fundamental proposition hasn't changed doesn't mean that Google hasn't done a hell of a lot of work into turning YouTube in a business that earns tens of billions of dollars a year.