> Cloud is where Google is learning the hard way that being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses.
I can't speak for Google, or about what Googley is. But I have worked a decade in the Danish public sector, and now for around a year in European Green Energy, and I think there is just a massive difference between Google and Amazon in this regard.
Denmark is one of the most digitized countries in the world, and I was there for the transition from self-hosted iron in the basement, to renting space for your iron in dedicated server farms, to going full Azure. Azure was/is the logical way to go for a lot of European Enterprise organisations because it hooks so nicely into the Microsoft infrastructure you undoubtedly already have. There is no real alternative to Microsoft Office in Denmark, Google Docs could (maybe should) have been, but I'll get to that later, and once you're buying the Office365 package as well as Windows licenses, you're going to have massive savings by going with Azure rather than AWS. This is partly because we don't buy licenses directly from Microsoft, but through partners and because Microsoft has some of the best B2B support in the world. I know Microsoft gets a lot of hate here on HN, and maybe rightly so, but it's by far the best tech company I've ever dealt with from a non-tech enterprise perspective. When team was rolled out, it was turned on for users automatically, which is a big no-no in Enterprise IT, but within an hour of it happening Microsoft had given us a custom hack to turn it off in our setup. Not long after, probably because the entire world of Enterprise was on the phone with Microsoft, it was off by default. But compare that sort of support level to Google, where you can talk with an automated form... Google will lose so hard that it's not even considered an option.
Amazon and Google were interesting in this regard. Because the where Google didn't really do anything, Amazon quickly realized that they couldn't sell AWS to Enterprise organisations if they didn't compete with Microsoft on support. Because that's sort of what you sell to the IT department in Enterprise Organisations. One thing is the product, the other thing is the ability for the CTO to tell the organisation that they are on the phone with Microsoft/Amazon headquarters and getting hourly updates when something goes wrong. That's of massive value, and Google doesn't do this. Amazon similarly didn't comply with the GDPR as fast as Microsoft. At first it seemed like Amazon didn't really think it mattered to them, and that we would still pick their cloud products, but it didn't last very long, and within a year, they became more compliant than Microsoft. I remember it well, because we had a few things in AWS at the time, and we needed to help filling out some "red-tape" and Amazons reply was basically "kindly fuck off", and then out of the blue 3 months later, we suddenly had a Danish AWS representative and free legal counseling from one of our major EU focused lawfirms contact us to help us get it done right.
Google didn't do anything like that. They sort of try in Education, but we're currently well into a big chromebook + Google Education and school start "scandal" of sorts here in Denmark. Because one of our cities failed to pass the national GDPR requirements and were basically forbidden from using Google Education at the start of the school year back in july (the school year starts in august). This didn't exactly happen, because it turned out they couldn't start the school year and that parents care more about education than whether or not Google snoop on the schoolwork or not. It was also sort of silly because it was just one municipality out of 98 that were forbidden from using Google Education and chromebooks and there are a lot of other municipalities that also use it. Anyway, that is sort of unrelated to what I want to use the example for, because the interesting part to me is how Google hasn't really solved the issue.
Google Education and Chromebooks are a massive business by Danish standards. The Public Sector is the biggest spender on IT, and if you can secure just half of the schools in the country for Google Education, that's one of the biggest opportunities for IT sales you can get here in Denmark. And Google hasn't bothered solved this issue? I think the very likely outcome is that all the schools are going to switch to Microsoft and Office365 and run Linux on their Chromebooks in the coming years because of this. I think this because Google isn't the first company to fumble the ball on Education. Apple did it first, and where almost every school used Apple products a decade ago, now they use none. Apple's problems weren't GDPR problems, the GDPR didn't exist back then but we did have national privacy laws and they were in perfect compliance with those. Apples issue was instead that their products didn't integrate into Enterprise IT policies, and since they didn't want to offer support or change ways, they were slowly rolled out and replaced by companies that did.
I think this may have been fine for Apple. They don't seem to be big on B2B sales, but for Google it's just so strange.