Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

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jacques_chester

I suspect this is down to how it's phrased by someone who may not be familiar with strategic planning.

It's common for businesses to work out several scenarios and estimate their outcomes. Then you look at the investment outcomes of those scenarios.

So quite plausibly there might have been these scenarios:

1. Invest More + High Growth

2. Invest More + Low Growth

3. Maintain Investment + High Growth

4. Maintain Investment + Low Growth

5. Divest

You pretty much always want to canvass the option to quit a business. You need it to keep your other estimates honest. Anything else is not only giving into sunk cost fallacy, it's flat out denying its existence.

So rejecting "Divest" doesn't mean it was ever a serious contender. It may be there mostly in the interests of completeness.

I can’t imagine Amazon execs having a discussion about getting out of the cloud business.

But Google doing it seems totally believable.

See the problem?

Dude, You're comparing apples and oranges. It makes no sense to compare GCP in 2017/2018 which is when the article refers to this conversation to AWS which predates it by 10 years. You don't think that AWS execs and Amazon execs had conversation about profitability in 2006?

AWS started 13 years ago, in 2006, with S3.

GCP started 11 years ago, 2008, with App Engine.

No, AWS and Amazon leaders did not even remotely discuss that possibility 2 years ago...

Google has offered cloud computing with the release of app engine almost a decade ago. They kept it running this whole time and have only added to the platform.

The entire discussion in the memo seems to be more about how much they want to compete at the level of AWS rather than being in cloud computing at all.

Based on the developments and investment so far, it’s clear GCP wants to be a serious contender.

Again, having the option numbers crunched is not the same as discussing it or seriously considering it. "Quit" and "Do Nothing" should always be included in scenario planning. Especially the latter, because by ordinary momentum it's usually what happens.

I expect Amazon plans have included scenarios such as "quit machine learning" and "don't invest in on-premise units".

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