> No they won't [shutter GCP]. This is ridiculous hyperbole.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
It's common for businesses to work out several scenarios and estimate their outcomes. Then you look at the investment outcomes of those scenarios.
So quite plausibly there might have been these scenarios:
1. Invest More + High Growth
2. Invest More + Low Growth
3. Maintain Investment + High Growth
4. Maintain Investment + Low Growth
5. Divest
You pretty much always want to canvass the option to quit a business. You need it to keep your other estimates honest. Anything else is not only giving into sunk cost fallacy, it's flat out denying its existence.
So rejecting "Divest" doesn't mean it was ever a serious contender. It may be there mostly in the interests of completeness.
But Google doing it seems totally believable.
See the problem?
GCP started 11 years ago, 2008, with App Engine.
No, AWS and Amazon leaders did not even remotely discuss that possibility 2 years ago...
The entire discussion in the memo seems to be more about how much they want to compete at the level of AWS rather than being in cloud computing at all.
Based on the developments and investment so far, it’s clear GCP wants to be a serious contender.
I expect Amazon plans have included scenarios such as "quit machine learning" and "don't invest in on-premise units".
I don't know how else to explain this. AWS and Azure are massive profit centers and GCP is slowly catching up. Cloud computing, machine learning, big data, IoT, and more have trillions in potential market cap.
It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big with this much investment already will exit that opportunity.
Most big corporations will exit any market, no matter how big if that market does not turn a profit.
Microsoft has one hell of an enterprise sales and marketing machine though, probably the best in the world, so I’d assume they are doing quite well, even if they are mostly reinvesting it.
> That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
I fail to see how this is even a reason to get off GCP, yet a good one.
If you're in competition with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and you intend to go after the same customer profiles then you would do well to ensure that your messaging is what those customers expect and that every outward signal you give is that you're in it for the long haul, with a much longer horizon than the companies that are going to be your customers can oversee so that the trust becomes implicit.
That way if some internal document gets released it doesn't look as though you are still undecided.
Anyway, no need to take my word for this, let's just see how it plays out in the longer term.
You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.
> The billions in investment and growth of the platform are the exact opposite signal.
At Google's level I would not expect less than billions in investment, the growth of the platform is for now still substantially lagging behind the competition as far as I know, the bulk of the companies I look at are solidly in the AWS camp or in some cases running on Azure, Google is still the exception but getting more common over time. I look at about 50 companies / year so that's a relatively small sample but they are typically well funded start-ups or later stage established companies.
> You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.
No, that's not how I'm reading it.