Existence risk here is HUGE. If GCP doesn't move the needle, Google will shut it down. AWS is a much more living organism and I can't see Amazon shutting it down before their drones take over ...
To shut down GCP, they would be shutting down the same services and infrastructure that power their own services. The dogfooding memo from years back is being taken to heart, and you're seeing more and more exposure of internal services and infrastructure.
The scary thing would be if it ends up reducing the rate of innovation because they worry about changing APIs or services too much; obsolete accumulates quickly when you're serving large numbers of people because most business want to write once run till it's dead. But this is true of any service that exposes anything but an extreme abstraction.
Exactly. If it wasn't making the money they'd just be shutting the public interface to this thing. It's not like it's orthogonal to their usual business, which is lots of computers and storage doing random workloads.
The scary thing would be if it ends up reducing the rate of innovation because they worry about changing APIs or services too much; obsolete accumulates quickly when you're serving large numbers of people because most business want to write once run till it's dead. But this is true of any service that exposes anything but an extreme abstraction.