[acdha]

There’s no doubt that they have invested a lot of money but that doesn’t guarantee returns and data centers have a fair amount of cost to keep running.

The big thing I’d like is to have Google Cloud broken out as a separate business. While it’s true that shutting it down would harm them, I haven’t gotten the impression that their management are especially concerned. As an enterprise customer of both, AWS seems way more motivated not just to develop their service but also just to do things like show up. Trying to get GCP people to sell things like Anthos was surprisingly hard, like they thought it was 2005 and people would buy just because of their name.

[dekhn]

I reward AWS with my business and tolerate GCP when necessary.

What's funny is there was a core of engineers back in 2009 who understood everything necessary to get the technical side of Cloud to be competitive with AWS, and mostly succeeded, but by then, it was clear that Google simply didn't know how to market to enterprises. The whole thing was a squandered opportunity and I simply did not understand at the time (2009-2011) just how unprepared Google's leadership was to expand beyond ads.

[acdha]

Strong agreement - I really think ads’ strength cost them multiple markets just because nobody was really worried about not being profitable. I’ve heard mixed things about working at AWS but everyone I know who’s worked there was keenly aware of whether customers liked what they worked on.

[Gibbon1]

My snide remark is Google the hive mind doesn't understand what a customer is. As in someone who in return for you promising to do something on an ongoing basis will give you money. Googlers react to that as if a street hustler is trying to get them to play three-card monte.

More likely they have the same problem Intel had. Intel had a lucrative impossible to replicate business in processors. As a result they regularly abandoned one market segment after another because they couldn't get the gross margin they expected. Googles doing the same exact thing.

Other problem is googles business is backwards in that they set the requirements out for what they'll do not the supposed see above customer. All these other business ventures have customers with strict demands that they want met.

[rkagerer]

I simply did not understand at the time (2009-2011) just how unprepared Google's leadership was to expand beyond ads.

That's a succinct and on-point observation.