In earlier posts we described our decision to chose Amazon’s EC2 over Google App Engine in recent days, and as part of the business perspective we noted that:
Amazon is accessible: both Amazon and Google have engineering centers in our neighborhood, and Amazon’s is, of course, the much larger presence, but the real issue was which company was more accessible? Amazon does a lot of outreach to the startup community in the Seattle area – Jeff Barr is everywhere! – whereas Google is a lot more aloof. It’s much easier to find an engineer or product manager at Amazon who will talk to you, and that really makes a difference for a startup. Real people matter.
Events in the past week have reassured us that we made the right choice. The very end of that post on choosing EC2 included a passing grumble about some long-standing problems with Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer.
What happened following that blog post was a pleasant surprise: an old colleague saw the post on LinkedIn and forwarded it to someone at Amazon, who promptly contacted Jeff Barr, the peripatetic and indefatigable evangelist for Amazon Web Services.
And within just one day after our griping, Jeff asked for a meeting with us to see how Amazon could make things better for us. This level of responsiveness was, frankly, astonishing when one considers the size of Kerika (rather tiny) and the size of Amazon (rather Amazonian).
We met Jeff today, and are happy to report that this ELB issue will soon go away for us and everyone else. But that was a minor aspect of the meeting: much of our discussion was a wide-ranging conversation about Kerika, collaboration platforms and the many uses for cloud computing in different market segments.
And the best part was finding out that Jeff had taken the trouble, earlier in the day, to try out Kerika for himself.
Returning from the meeting, we couldn’t help but reflect upon cultures of the two companies that we are relying upon for our business model: Amazon and Google. Amazon is providing the cloud computing infrastructure, and Google is providing the OpenID authentication and, more importantly, the Google Docs suite that is integral to the Kerika product offering. Both sets of technologies are essential to Kerika’s success.
But the cultures of these two companies are clearly different: Amazon relies on both technology and people, whereas Google, it would appear, is purely an online presence. (To be fair, we must note that while both companies have engineering centers in the Seattle area, Amazon’s footprint is many times larger than Google’s.)
But, still: who could we have tried to reach at Google? Who is the public face of Google’s App Engine? Or, of Google Docs, for that matter? There are two substantial Google engineering centers nearby, but Google the company remains a cloud of distributed intelligence – much their servers – accessible only via HTTP.
A recent article at All Things D speculates that Larry Page may eliminate Google’s managers in large amounts, in order to free the animal spirits of the engineers, and a similar article on TechCrunch notes that “Page famously has a low opinion of managers, especially product managers who try to tell engineers what to do.”
There can be no gainsaying Google’s engineering talents, or its remarkable achievements, but will Google 3.0 be an organization that has even less human contact with its customers and partners?