Yeah exactly. It is basically a commodity at this point - and in commodities margins are like 3% and there is nothing you can compete on except price - which becomes a race to the bottom. And there is no booming industry where this is the case.
But still you can compete on prize or provide proper localization. In your link they share the are based in UK and available in 7 countries. Something that took half a year and a few devs now it can be done by one indie in 1 month living in cheaper country and charging 1/5th and still be happy about it.
Reading without actually doing does not really result in learning, only very marginal one.
Try reading tutorials on a new programming language for 30 minutes and then open new text file and write basic loop with print.
It won’t even compile- which shows you haven’t really learned anything. Just read an interesting story. Sure you pita few bits here and there but you still don’t know how to do even the moat basic thing.
Working with an LLM feels very different to me from reading a static tutorial.
It's more like having the tutorial author there with you and actively engaging with them to collaborate on building the exact tutorial for the exact project you're looking to build.
I'll take a bidirectional conversation with a subject matter expert (and when you're just staring to learn Rust LLMs can absolutely take the role of "expert", in comparison to you at least) over struggling on my own against static documentation and the Rust compiler.
And I can take over the wheel at any moment! It's entirely on me to decide how much I get to do vs how much the LLM does for me.
That's why learning in this way is a skill in its own right, and one that I'd like to see studied and formalized and taught to other people.
We are talking here about the most basic things- nothing AI related. Basic billing. The fact that it is not working says a lot about the future of the product and company culture in general (obviously they are not product-oriented)
Given how many paid offerings Google has, and the complexity and nuance to some of those offering (e.g. AdSense) I am pretty surprised that Google don't have a functioning drop in solution for billing across the company.
If they do, it's failing here. The idea of a penny pinching megacorp like Google failing technically even in the penny pinching arena is a surprise to me.
Even though my post complaining about google's billing and incoherent mess got so many upvotes, I'll be the first to say that there is nothing basic about "give me money".
Apart from the fact that what happens to the money when it gets to google (putting it in the right accounts, in the right business, categorizing it, etc), it changes depending on who you're ASKING for money.
1. Getting money from an individual is easy. Here's a credit card page.
2. Getting money from a small business is slightly more complicated. You may already have an existing subscription (google workspaces), just attach to it.
3. As your customers get bigger, it gets more squishy. Then you have enterprise agreements, where it becomes a whole big mess. There are special prices, volume discounts, all that stuff. And then invoice billing.
The point is that yes, we all agree that getting someone to plop down a credit card is easy. Which is why Anthropic and OpenAI (who didn't have 20 years of enterprise billing bloat) were able to start with the simplest use case and work their way slowly up.
But I AM sensitive to how hard this is for companies as large and varied as Google or MS. Remember the famous Bill Gates email where even he couldn't figure out how to download something from Microsoft's website.
It's just that they are also LARGE companies, they have the resources to solve these problems, just don't seem to have the strong leadership to bop everyone on the head until they make the billing simple.
And my guess is also that consumers are such a small part of how they're making money (you best believe that these models are probably beautifully integrated into the cloud accounts so you can start paying them from day one).
My first thought was this is the whole thing about managers at Google trying to get employees under other managers fired and their own reports promoted -- but it feels too similar to how fucked up all the account and billing stuff is at Microsoft. This is what happens when you try to "fix" something by layering on more complexity and exceptions.
From past experience, the advertising side of the business was very clear with accounts and billing. GCP was a whole other story. The entire thing was poorly designed, very confusing, a total mess. You really needed some justification to be using it over almost everything else (like some Google service which had to go through GCP.) It's kind of like an anti-sales team where you buy one thing because you have to and know you never want to touch anything from the brand ever again.
We made the bet 2 years ago to build AI Studio on top of the Google Cloud infra. One of the real challenges is that Google is extremely global, we support devs in hundreds of countries with dozens of different billing methods and the like. I wish the problem space was simple but on the first day I joined Google we kicked off the efforts to make sure we could bring billing into AI Studio, so January cannot come soon enough : )
When you order a website on upwork - you didn't build it. You bought it.
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