[IshKebab]

I'd say it was wrong. Amazon and Microsoft now make huge amounts of money from their clouds. It can't be that low margin!

But I feel like their real mistake was trying to do things right, rather than compatibly. I think Google Cloud Engine is undeniably a better system than ad-hoc Linux VMs. But nobody really wants to rewrite all their code to work with it.

[gowld]

Google Compute Engine offers ad-hoc VMs. Google (and Amazon) have many offerings.

[IshKebab]

Yes they do now because they eventually realised that they had to. But for 5 years (2008-2013) Google App Engine was their only offering.