Google is certainly on the mind of Amazon. In a recent presentation, Amazon included a photo of a product from a Google data center. This was rather interesting, since Amazon Web Services is a direct competitor to Google Cloud Platform.
Google quick to point the mistake
Amazon Web Services hosted its annual conference re:Invent last week, where Jerry Hunter, vice president of infrastructure, made a presentation that (by mistake) included a photo of networking hardware from a Google data center. Hunter made the presentation titled ‘Innovation at Scale’ on October 7th.
In a Google+ post on Sunday, Google’s senior vice president for technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, discussed the incident, giving the credit of the discovery to Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Platform. Hölzle made use of this opportunity to talk about Google and poke fun at its rival.
“One more reason to be certain that +Google Cloud Platform? has the world’s best infrastructure: while bragging about their network, a competitor shows images of Google’s network. … Thanks for the acknowledgment, +Amazon Web Services?! But next time please show our logo on the slide :-),” Hölzle said.
Hölzle mentioned in the post that the image used by Amazon Web services in their presentation is a part of the search giant’s vaunted ‘Jupiter’ network, and it supports the entire company from the inside. Lately, Google has been showing off its networking equipment. A photo of Google’s Jupiter switch fabric that showed up in Hunter’s talk was shared publicly for the first time at the Open Networking Summit in June 2015.
Amazon speaks up in defense
Commenting on Hölzle post, Jim Sherhart, the marketing manager at Amazon, said it was just an accident. Sherhart, who was among the people who worked on the presentation, accepted his mistake, and clarified that the company has a lot of IP in its datacenters, therefore, it does not typically show images of them in presentations.
Sherhart said that he chose the image thinking that it was a generic stock photo from Google search as the image had no branding, trademark, or meta identification. The executive noted that the image in the presentation has been replaced now, and added that he was glad that Google guys were watching re:Invent.
This clarification from Sherhart can be believed because Amazon does not generally share pictures of its datacenters, unlike Google.
