[cheriot]

I see a semblance to their original motivations in building chrome. By making the web as a whole more competitive, it made google's offerings more competitive (more ad surfaces, more gmail users, less OS lockin). Actually winning the browser war isn't necessary.

For a huge number or organizations, the cloud isn't a meaningful option because the switching costs are astronomical. Kubernetes, otoh, means someone that chooses on prem today actually has a migration path later.

Google benefits hugely from that path just existing.