Google Cloud product lead bails, explains why it lags AWS and Azure

A senior Google Cloud product manager has left the company and on his way out shared two mistakes he feels held back the company’s cloud.

Product Management Lead Amir Hermelin took to Medium to announce his departure from Google, “to pursue a high-risk high-reward opportunity with a company that’s disrupting personal finance.”

On his way out the door he reflected on his time at the company – all positive on the workplace front – but also noted two big mistakes he thinks have hurt Google’s cloud.

The first was not targeting the enterprise.

“We were led by very smart engineering managers — that held tenures of 10+ years at Google, so that’s what grew their careers and that’s what they were familiar with,” Hermelin wrote. “Seeing success with Snapchat and the likes, and lacking enough familiarity with the enterprise space, it was easy to focus away from ‘Large Orgs’.”

“This included insufficient investments in marketing, sales, support, and solutions engineering, resulting in the aforementioned being inferior compared to the competitors.”

The second error was not differentiating with containers sooner. Hermelin said Google chased AWS EC2 for years and ignored the fact it had built its own business to astounding scale with containers.

“So our native internal way of running things — containers — was to take a backseat for a few years, until a small startup by the name of Docker managed to hype up containers enough to make them relevant. Google took notice, and the rest is history.”

He also wrote that Google missed serverless, despite its own App Engine being an early implementation of a now-hot technology.

“Neither AWS or Azure had anything like it, but we had to divert too many resources to satisfy customers that were asking for features similar to what our competitors offered at the time.”

Hermelin said Google has its house in order now, with Kubernetes take-up and machine learning’s increasing popularity evidence that its cloud is poised to soar.