[ra7]

What does Google still need to catch up on in cloud? Building products/services? Sales? AFAIK, they have comparable cloud services to most AWS/Azure offerings.

[colinmhayes]

Mostly I think it’s just acquiring customers. The big cloud providers go to great lengths to lock their customers in, so convincing them to switch is hard. Requires a much better product which seems pretty much impossible against aws and azure or a much cheaper price.

[levi-turner]

From someone who does enterprise technical sales for a B2B company: Identity Management is a major area of concern for GCP / GSuite, at least in the enterprise space, especially for the low to moderately technical folks that I sell to. The same could be said for AWS but they have first mover advantage in many ways.

[bamboozled]

Trust for one thing. They just cut off customers services with line of recourse. Also shut down products with little warning.

[ra7]

I don't think shutting down products applies to GCP services. Even if it did, it doesn't explain the $858M loss. They are spending big on something to "catch up", I'm just not sure what it is.

[RandomBK]

IIRC it's mostly incentives for large companies to jump ship

[ushakov]

> shutting down products applies to GCP services

they regularly deprecate old API versions in favour of new ones, which are not backwards compatible and usually more expensive

any time Google Cloud APIs change you have to update your code

and they break stuff, introduce bugs more often that you'd expect and prioritize new features over fixes (see bugtracker for confirmation)

this is why i'm never again touching GCP