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Comment by erung88 | Hacker News Reader

They make you feel like they're smart but everything is relative. Google cloud is constantly the thrid in the market and significantly leg behind AWS in terms of market share while its CEO was replaced every 2 years so there are definitely smarter people (e.g. AWS engineers) out there.

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Being third in the market is independent from the quality of services IMO. Whether the services are being offered that a lot of businesses need is a different question. The services Google Cloud does offer tend to be well designed but many of them are simply not what established businesses (and their engineering organizations) are accustomed to. Lower marketshare is not a direct consequence of engineering excellence (or an alleged lack thereof).

Conversely, simply having more market share doesn't mean AWS services are well engineered and the engineers are smarter (they might be, but you cannot make this claim).

I totally agree the quality of a product may or may not be directly proportional to the market share (e.g. Windows). My previous comment has nothing to do with engineering excellence. I never work at Google nor an expert on Google cloud so I don't know whether Cloud Google is well-designed (and I'm not surprised if it's).

There're different ways to measure "smart". My view is that in the cloud computing business there are people smarter than them (at least in terms of market share) so it's perfectly fine that Google Cloud engineers learn from their competitors in terms of engineering, marketing, etc.

They are only smart in the context of what they are optimizing against. It’s like that for all area’s of an expertise or goal/ideal.

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