Is this "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" play where Google makes Apple look bad in an effort to avoid some of the regulations that might catch Apple?
I cant figure out why Google would want this otherwise?
I cant figure out why Google would want this otherwise?
Normally how this type of stuff happens, is you'll have some internal team working on a new initiative and looking for headline customers, they will reach out to the sales teams, and say, "hey, you are working with XYZ customer, want to float this idea with them". It's a win-win.
So, having said all they. Google vs Apple, etc, and other large competition politics almost never are on the radar of these teams. They just want to help the customer win, get the sales commissions, and make their internal product successful. It's easy to look at this stuff from the outside and think there is some big plan but the motivation down at the teams level has nothing to do with that since they want mostly to look good on perf reviews.
I have no knowledge of the internals here just talking from experience from what I've seen.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend-nearly-45...
[1] https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/spotify-google-cloud-pla...
[2] https://cloud.google.com/customers/spotify
Note: I originally had Shopify here. The same strategy/tactics apply.
This is probably just a good show of faith to regulators while Google still collects their percentage of subscription revenue from Spotify on the backend.
This is an advantage of Google vs Apple. Google has multiple business relationships with Spotify. An increase in advertising dollars, infrastructure spend on GCP, etc could all offset the lost revenue for Google here.
I suspect Google expects an incoming loss.