> “We could never pin down Google on what their true business model was,” says a Cerner executive involved in the discussions.
Imagine being that insecure in what you do. What were they looking for? A non-compete from Google? Innovate or die.
Imagine being that insecure in what you do. What were they looking for? A non-compete from Google? Innovate or die.
It's not insecurity to paranoia to worry about today's partner being tomorrow's competitor when it's so common. In fact, this is exactly one of the things China has used to jump start many industries. In their fervor to enter the Chinese market, many companies have given over intellectual property in exchange for access (an excahnge only really on the table because the Chinese government could and did constrain that access otherwise), and found that after some time they had local competitors with similar advantages (and possibly government consrtaints again to boot).
That a company might recognize that a deal may have long-term consequences that vastly outweigh the short term gains is not something to deride, it's exactly what they should be on the lookout for if they intend to survive and grow.
Heck, dealing with large scale Enterprise tech, a 10-year roadmap (in terms of updates & support) is the standard. I don't expect Google to have such roadmaps for things they're piloting, but then I also wouldn't build anything critical, anything that might be strategic and core to my business, on someone else's "pilot" project.
Managing a massive business is complex, successfully doing so cannot be reduced to something as simple as "innovate or die".
Good faith. Google has for years selected for raw bureaucratic ambition and a cloistered view of technical talent. That set of cultural defects is coming home to roost.
You can say the same to Google Cloud.
Close cousin to "financially support your competitors and die."
Google's very business model is selling their users to their customers.
3. Know that customer data is not used for advertising.
You own your data. Google Cloud does not process your data for advertising purposes.
I believe usage for ads is highlighted on the non-legalese privacy page because it's a common question/concern, but the terms specify that data can only be processed as requested by the customer (IANAL, but that's my read and understanding as a Googler who works on Cloud infrastructure).
That being said, and with 15 years of adtech of experience, I guarantee that there's absolutely no usage of business customers' first party data by Google's adtech system. While companies can use it to match and target their users, they have to do explicitly with lots of restrictions and protocols and it's only become more limited with new privacy regulations.
That said, it's completely understandable that companies don't want to help fund competitors. --Walmart knows that they could use AWS without having any real fear of Amazon employees looking at their data to get a competitive advantage, but they chose Azure because Microsoft is not a direct competitor.
Likewise, companies providing healthcare software look at what Google is doing in that space and they don't want to fund the competition by using GCP.
These are rational decisions that we would expect companies to make. It's actually more surprising that, for example, Netflix still uses AWS given the fact that Amazon is a direct competitor in the streaming business. --GCP or Azure would make more sense here unless Amazon is giving them a really good deal to keep their business.