[HillRat]

I like GCP quite a bit, and I've architected on it both in the "giant global company" and "small startup" spaces, but it's just not well-positioned competitively. AWS has first-mover advantage and massive lock-in, while Azure has a comfortable second place position with companies that are deeply ensconced in the MSFT and .NET ecosystems and took longer to build a cloud strategy. Meanwhile, GCP was well below feature parity for a long time, didn't really have an enterprise strategy that would allow it to take on its competitors, and never successfully positioned themselves as the startup cloud of choice despite that being their focus.

Today, GCP's still better-positioned for small companies who need to move fast and are more price-sensitive, but they've done a good job catching up on the enterprise space, and having late-mover advantage has helped them avoid some of the footguns you see in AWS. There are still a lot of sharp corner cases in their services and documentation, and they're as bad as anyone else in Google when it comes to taking customer direction (it really helps to have direct contacts in the organization or be a large-scale implementation partner), but they're a perfectly valid cloud option with a lot of great services at relatively aggressive price points (and, arguably, if you're working in health or life sciences, they're actually a very good option compared to AWS or Azure thanks to their extensive healthcare API portfolio). Unfortunately for them, they're never going to be anything more than the fourth-largest global cloud provider, which isn't a bad place to be, but probably a bit humiliating for GOOG.