[nostrademons]

It takes time to move the needle. Google has probably the best infrastructure in the world, but it was designed for Google's problems, tightly intertwined with the products it supports, and built for a different performance/productivity trade-off than most independent customers are willing to put up with. Even now, GCE beats EC2 on price/performance metrics, it just lacks some of the conveniences that AWS users expect.

[felixgallo]

That's kind. You could also say that google has had a mediocre, confusing, poorly supported also-ran cloud offering for years and shows no sign of doing anything but continuing the current path.

The needle is moved by having nontraditional ideas and following through with commitment. I know Google has enough great minds for (a), where, bafflingly, is (b)?