Google’s biggest opportunity is Cloud. They’re playing catch up but with the culture and staff they have, that’s where I’d be focussing my efforts. I think the 2020s will be the biggest decade for cloud adoption.
I don't think it is. Their hard-earned reputation for canceling services is really hurting them now. They never accounted for the effect of all the users they've been continually pissing off moving up in the ranks in companies and deciding never to use Google services. The leaked communication that suggests that they could actually cancel GCP doomed any chance that that would be a big player next to AWS and Azure.
>The leaked communication that suggests that they could actually cancel GCP...
People need to stop coupling their applications to cloud services for this very reason! It really bothers me that people architect their systems tightly coupled to AWS - Amazon LOVES it, of course, because this is the kind of vendor lock-in that Oracle could only dream about. (Amazon's vendor lock in is strictly superior because it is at runtime. I don't think Oracle ever had that power.)
Its incredible that so many companies have embraced AWS so completely, never giving thought to the the fact that they are giving Bezos total power over their technology investments. The sunk costs are only going to snowball, and AWS can and will raise prices almost arbitrarily, because opting out of AWS will mean a rewrite, which is some multiple of those sunk costs. That is, a company has to recapitulate ALL the money they paid to build software ALL AT ONCE. This is an existential threat to all small businesses, and an easy "just pay extra" grumble for medium and big businesses. Again, great for Amazon, bad for everyone else.
Google can and should get in cloud by pushing cross-cloud technology that lets companies have their cake and eat it too: cloud-hosted auto-scaling applications, AND the ability to pick a new cloud vendor without a rewrite. I suspect K8s is a good push in the direction. So, yeah, it's counter-intuitive but I think G could win big by pushing vendor-independent cloud tech, starting with K8s. The dream is that Google can cancel whatever it wants, and customers will just make an account at another cloud provider and keep rolling.
They don't typically complain, but when asked, it's common knowledge among all the programmers at work and all the ones I know. Google can't be counted on. Furthermore, it's tech types who make the decision to use GCP or not, not average Joes who use their other services, so you'd want to look more at places like this for the prevailing opinions.
There is the old "nobody is ever fired for choosing IBM", and I think Google actually succeeded in forging a "shouldn't we avoid Google ?" mentality.
I saw it real time with Maps changing its pricing model, where an international company reworked all their maps display. It was a lot of money, and it's not something you brush under the rug explaining the contracts are otherwise marvellous.
Then there was the whole google chat -> hangouts -> meets transitions with every variations in-between, and messaging applications are one of the most sensible tool to change in an enterprise environment. In particular the bigger it is the worse these changes will be perceived.
When came time to choose between AWS and GCP, the choice was clearly political, more than the technical merits.
Stadia, from what I've heard, appears to be near-dead on arrival, and a big part of that is skepticism of streaming video games and skepticism around Google killing the service (and rendering any purchased games totally unplayable).
Nah, Google has never been good at B2B enterprise sales. Microsoft has a massive enterprise sales network already and will find it easy to push Azure. AWS has first mover advantage.
Nope. Cloud is being commoditized as we speak which means there will be a race to the bottom when it comes to the margins. Bezos has already boasted that he is willing to turn down the dial for margins all the way down if it comes to that. Right now there still lot to eat for everyone but soon scarcity of finding new customers will take hold. THen you will find companies to cut down prices to get more customers and huge margins we see now evaporate very quickly. In that setting, only Amazon has good survival skills.
In my view, the biggest opportunity is AI. If I was CEO of Google, I would make a massive investment not just in research but engineering turn-key AI systems that can give businesses a massive boost.
