Wasn't Orkut dominant in Brazil? I suppose they killed it to pump Google+? Anyway it makes you wonder if Google Cloud will really survive. Can the world's #2 public tech company by market cap really afford to be a distant third (fourth?) in a market?
It was big in Brazil and India. I saw the transition from Orkut to Facebook in India. I arrived in India with a Facebook account in 2005 and nobody was on Facebook, so I created an Orkut account. By 2008 Orkut was gone, Facebook was all everyone knew.
I think it (Google Cloud) can. I suspect there's a pretty big difference between being a dominant social network vs being a dominant cloud platform. People evaluating cloud platforms are going to be looking at cost + functionality in a much more pragmatic way compared to people just joining whatever network happens to have the highest number of their friends already registered. While there are still certainly network effects for platforms (third party tools, people with experience, etc...) Google can really compete on cost + performance by nature of their existing scale without needing to throw tons of money at the problem like another competitor would
One of my worries is that there seems to be the "Google way of doing things" which the rest of the world can't easily adjust to, the way Google insider policies can dictate. If they're too much of a special snowflake it'll slow adoption. Hope you're right though.
I believe it was very popular in a few countries. Brazil and India come to mind but I'm not sure.