I would say the Google strategy was wrong.
For every AWS API with significant adoption, Google should have implemented it. Make transitioning from AWS to GCE as simple as possible.
For every AWS API with significant adoption, Google should have implemented it. Make transitioning from AWS to GCE as simple as possible.
Not to mention some of the paradigms: regionalized dashboards/endpoints, the mess that is EC2Classic/VPC, lack of projects for compartmentalization/namespacing ... a lot of those APIs also leak internal implementation details of their products, and trying to match them would be silly.
And they did follow one API that everybody else has: S3. And that one is decent only because it's basically HTTP with some auth headers sprinkled in.
My overall experience with GCloud is much better thanks to these redesigns. AWS just seems like an underdesigned mess of loosely coupled components implemented by siloed teams.
That was my experience as well. It felt like they never included any UX person throughout any of the decisions. Their naming convention alone always seemed confusing to me, although it does seem to be improving.
AWS was the clear leader, and sure, you can try to attract different customers... but they should have also tried to make it as easy as possible for existing AWS customers to migrate.
Then, you offer your customers additional services that the other guy doesn't offer.