GCP and the fight for the public cloud space
I was recently at Google Next, my second time and as Diana Greene was rambling through her keynote I needed to distract myself and was thinking why Google lags in the space even though they have great tech.
Here are some of my thoughts and would love to hear other folks take on it:
1. Google continues to be a Consumer company vs Enterprise. THey recognize this and Diana was hired to get them better aligned and I do see some of the changes she is bringing but it's been slow progress.
2. Google's developer driven culture leads to Products which are 80% done but the final 20% which is so critical to make them usable never happens. The devs by then have moved on to the next cool problem to solve. The 20% left is normally things like better integration with existing tools, better documentation and examples, things staying in Alpha and Beta for years and all other things which make it easy for the tech to be used. This one is the most difficult one for Google to change because it's the very core of their culture.
3. Lack of good vertical and horizontal integration with their existing services. They have great technology building blocks but don't do well to integrate them to build solution platforms. They lack a story around use cases companies can use to solve complex problems. Google's stance has been here are these great building blocks which don't at times fit in seamlessly but here are APIs go figure it out. Developers can make this work but it makes decision makes like CTO/CIOs apprehensive. I did see a pleasant change in this area this time with the integrations around k8s, Envoy and Istio as well as the next level of abstractions being built on top of it like Knative. Google of the past would have never stitched them to together to give a platform. Where do they use Envoy?