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0 pointsRNCTX4y ago0 comments

Not really surprising if you consider their likely motivations.

Google isn't in the business of selling things to end users, they're in the business of selling ads. The only thing GCP gives them (outside of getting wall streeters off their backs a few years ago when everyone and their brother was starting a cloud service) is a credit to their own infrastructure cost by selling excess to random joes.

Therefore I'm not surprised that AWS continues to be the defacto, they do sell things to end users. I'm not surprised that Azure is growing quickly, either, since MS also sells things to end users and they needed a way to transition their on-premise stuff to the wires.

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yashap4y ago

I mean, GCP is a decent source of revenue for them. i.e. last quarter:

* Alphabet did ~$55 billion in revenue overall last quarter, ~$4 billion was from "Cloud", which is GCP + Workspace (I don't think they disclose how much is GCP alone?). Although, for now it's a money loser for them, they had operating losses of ~$1 billion for Cloud, but the operating losses are shrinking over time, it'll become profitable eventually

* In contrast, Amazon did ~$108 billion in revenue overall last quarter, and ~$13.5 billion was from AWS. Although unlike GCP, AWS is highly profitable, ~$4 billion in operating income for the quarter, which is almost half of Amazon's total operating income

But AWS isn't THAT much higher a percentage of Amazon's revenue than GCP is of Alphabet's revenue. And in terms of COSTS, AWS is actually spending less, relative to their overall revenue (Amazon spending ~$9.5 billion of $108 billion total revenue on AWS, Google spending ~$5 billion of $55 billion total revenue on "Cloud").

AWS has been around longer than GCP, and they've certainly spent more absolute dollars, so it makes sense it's further ahead and more polished. Yeah, AWS is more used to selling things to end users than Google, they may have a better culture for quality there, but Google invests heavily in GCP, and it's a pretty significant revenue stream for them. I'm guessing their motivations are similar, both see Cloud offerings as a big revenue stream first and foremost.