[acdha]

The difference is that GCP is a distant #3 (going on 4). It’s much easier to find engineers and tools for AWS and a fair amount of the cost historically was working around gaps. That doesn’t mean there are no reasons to use it, of course, but it undercuts the amount of pressure they can apply. Given the well-known internal deadline for profitability, I’d be surprised if didn’t give some current or potential customers pause.

[frays]

Who will become #3 if GCP is going on #4?

[acdha]

Alibaba is not far behind them:

https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-...

It's not hard to imagine some customers jumping to AWS or Azure, which most large organizations are likely to already be familiar with[1] moves like this & that looming mandate causing C-level concerns since everyone knows GCP is not profitable at the current pricing but is expected to become so soon. A lot of big organizations prefer to pay a predictable amount of money than run the risk of price increases blowing their budget.

The other possibility I was thinking about is consolidation in the less popular providers — e.g. what happens if IBM sells their cloud service to Oracle or Salesforce, or a major customer switches a lot of volume to them. Oracle comes to mind since their bandwidth pricing is like an order of magnitude lower than AWS — I'm sure Zoom negotiated hefty discounts but they still picked Oracle for a reason and I'd bet it's the fact that their business is largely network egress.

1. e.g. if you use Office 365 and GCP, there is a valid argument for consolidating on a single vendor and I'd be surprised if that didn't work on a few customers since there's approximately a 0% chance that the Microsoft reps aren't going to toss some discounts around to encourage it.