AWS is going for pure volume.
MSFT is going for customer service and "enterprise ready" (HIPAA, gov't, etc)
GCP is a bit in no-man's land. Diane Greene appears to be heading it towards Azure, but it's very un-Google-like. (Google likes high margin businesses that can be support by technology solutions, not people)
They're the unexpected player and they suck at marketing though :D
Having dealt with their paid offerings.
On paper, Google Cloud looks great. Pricing is definitely better but raw VM performance is not. You get what you pay for. Stability is not anywhere near AWS. Had multi region load balancer outages. VMs going half the performance suddenly, out of nowhere. Support is non existent or much more expensive than AWS.
We were happy with it for a while but I'd not suggest it for anything critical anymore.
If you have a specific example of GCP support not working well for you, please drop me a line at jani at google dot com and I'll be happy to look into it.
Unfortunately you just described why people won't prefer GCP. With your competitor, AWS, people actually get a support but with GCP, they don't get anyone unless they complain on reddit, hacker news, twitter etc. and hoping that one of GCP employees may come across to their issue and they'd get some support. No sane company would invest into this.
If you are not a technology company, the value of your very few good tech people's time tends to outweigh technology expenses and you can't attract a lot of top notch ops people anyway because you can't promise them an exciting careers.
Remember that bulk of the fortune 500 is not tech. So you want to pay that support expense and get your people all the help they need. Whoever has a good track record of providing that help gets the business.
Their entire business proposition revolves around getting products and services in front of exactly the people looking to spend money on those things. They were able to market Chrome super effectively, taking a lot of share from IE. Chromebooks and their flagship phones get lots of attention.
So why can't they get the message of GCP in front of the most likely customers?
AWS Lambda has a major head start and is a big reason for its head of vision above Google. Don't get me wrong, Google has a great quality cloud, but the pace and breadth of Amazon's offering is breathtaking.
One of the big controversies was IBM Softlayer being reduced to niche status, which led to howling of a volume never heard out of New York... which delayed the report months... but Gartner stuck to their guns. It's a pretty fair report.
I think you can replace "Cloud" with whatever technology Gartner or most analysts write about.
These firms are little more than uninformed hype producers that fuel the enterprise software spend cycle through marketing (webinars, "research", tap-my-back-events and 3k€ "reports") that tell CIOs/CTOs what they should already know, by definition of their function: what technologies to consider for their business problems, why and how.
On the other hand, they provide a nice scapegoat when someone needs to offload responsibility, a bit like the "no one ever got fired for buying recommended by Gartner".
PS: wish I could find Zed Shaw's video on "calling bullshit" (or related), as it includes a nice anecdote on dealing with industry analysts.
I keep recommending GCP to people, and they wrinkle their noses skeptically. Part of it is Google's reputation for bad support and for killing products; I have to tell them that while that rep is definitely extremely well deserved, GCP operates completely differently. Another part of it is not knowing what GCP is -- it's flying surprisingly low under many people's radar. Some people think it's just App Engine, which I get the impression that a lot of people got burnt by in the early days (apparently it's great now; never used it).
I think Google has a chance, but they need to work on their marketing. I don't know how they would fix the reputation problem, though, other than bide their time and hope that time heals all wounds.
Went to use it again for another client, and mid-development, they froze the account with no way to recover it.
Well, my Nike job was for a live event. Had it gotten shutdown the same way, I would have been fucked. Holy shit even the thought of that happening scares the shit out of me—this was a multi-million dollars live event!
That killed GCP for me permanently. Same CRAP Google support they always have, but now with the ability to do serious damage to my reputation. Never. Again.