I was lucky enough to start my career sat on the next desk across from Kirat. Genius programmer and nice guy! He later went on to found Beacon platform which was the same again, as a cloud hosted service.
They need something like this as it's hard and flaky to automate Google apps with AI. However, step 2 drops me to a fairly technical looking page where I have to configure Google Cloud. If they had a one click installer to automate Google Apps it would be an absolute killer use case for AI for me.
I wish I knew the difference. I’ve ran or been close to tens of businesses over the last 20 years and we’ve always paid the Google tax, but I’m not sure it’s ever had a positive ROI.
The AdWords platform is extremely complicated nowadays, and try as I might I can’t get any impressions from it. I then went through a period with an AdWords specialist from their team who also couldn’t get any impressions. It’s like they don’t want or need my money.
The bigger issue is that LLMs haven’t had much training on Q as there’s little publically available code. I recently had to try and hack some together and LLMs couldn’t string simple pieces of code together.
There is some truth in this. I fit into a few of these buckets and I don’t think I could ever recommend their enterprise stuff after having my favourite consumer products pulled.
The first attempt was to sell a crappy PaaS and container registry.
The second attempt was about monetising the desktop tools, more of a Dev tools play.
They have never really tried to bait and switch and monetise the Docker engine which always seemed like an open goal to me. $XX/year per engine and they would have been the next VMWare. Alas, seems like the current strategy is working well.
Alongside the change in strategy, I think there has also been a change in culture. Docker 1.0 was absolutely dripping in arrogance and weren’t set up for an enterprise sale. Developer tools seems like a much more natural fit.