Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Selling GSuite is very different than selling compute. Besides being SaaS vs. infrastructure, the GSuite contracts are tiny compared to enterprise infrastructure. If a company with 100,000 employees paid list price for GSuite monthly, that would only be $1,000,000/mo, which is peanuts for an enterprise contract. Especially since they would probably get a huge bulk discount.

What I mean by counter-cultural is that at Google, they try to solve problems with computers instead of humans. It's worked really well for them so far, but it won't work for selling huge enterprise contracts. Yes, they have spun up a small support and sales team, but they will need to grow it a lot to support lots of large enterprises. Also, in companies that cater to enterprises, the sales team drives the engineering roadmap, or it is at least a collaboration. From talking to folks in Google, it seems that they don't really allow the sales team any input in to product cycles or technology.

And I attended their cloud conference and I'm very aware of their customer base vs. AWS. Their customers would all be considered fairly small to AWS, with the exception of a few big players.

Edit: An additional anecdote, I saw firsthand how they support an enterprise install of thousands of GSuite users. For the most part, it was "there's the docs, good luck". Sometimes they would assign an engineer, who would never come on site, to tell us that what we want is impossible.



Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: