Remember Google Buzz? Orkut? Wave? Reader? Google Talk? Then there was Google Picasa…which became photos…so far. There are sites dedicated to what we call the Google Graveyard. This doesn’t even get into the Google Glass, Site Search, Search Appliance and others. I logged into my Google Analytics platform today and found it to be a completely different UI and UX than I have ever seen before…without warning. I used to use Google Hangouts On Air for the Virtual Design Master event every year until this year when HOA no longer works, so I have had to move to using Zoom and pushing to a Youtube Live Event.
The reason that I bring these up is that we have an optics problem with Google which may affect how many potential enterprise cloud customers choose to adopt, or rather to not adopt, Google Cloud Platform. One of the big things that traditional enterprise customers enjoy is the warm embrace of platforms that have consistency. Google has tended to have some challenges around product changes and the public face of those changes. Google most likely has lots of data backing the decision to shift or sunset a product.
Can GCP make Enterprises Greene with Envy?
Diane Greene has come over to Google by way of her most recent startup Bebop being acquired. It’s my opinion that the startup was the packaging in which they could acquire the real value, which is Diane herself. Diane has a proven past success in launching a little virtualization concept into the juggernaut that became VMware. The most recent Google Cloud Next event featured a strong presence of a new focus on the enterprise with an aim to become the number 1 public cloud provider within five years.
A quote that stood out from the event was “I actually think we have a huge advantage in our data centers, in our infrastructure, availability, security and how we automate things. We just haven’t packaged it up perfectly yet.” which highlights the challenge that Google will face. The need for many enterprises is a packaged and neatly consumable product that we know we can adopt and maintain with long support plans and clean deprecation.
There is little doubt of the ability of Google to develop incredible products which will give birth to next-generation application infrastructure that few can rival. The only doubt comes around whether enterprise audiences are going to be ready to adapt to the speed at which Google innovates their product set. If Kubernetes is any sign of how well we are leaning in, then it is very easy to see that Google can take the market on and win a significant share.
Google Cloud Platform will be a juggernaut in the public cloud realm. That is a fact which is being proven out by some major customers moving into the platform already and many more dabbling. Multi-cloud is the new cloud, so GCP will inevitably become a key player in that strategy because of it’s underlying GKE product to support Kubernetes workloads. In my opinion, the multi-cloud approach enabled by containerized workloads with an enterprise-grade scheduler is going to become the goal we should strive for.
The only question is how long it will take before we can all put our trust in one product that Google has lacked in, which is consistency.