I'm fairly certain Google Cloud is not profitable. Even if it is profitable, Google will divest from business that don't hit a certain scale (billion $ businesses). Basically their goal is to never have employees staffed on projects which yield a low $ / employee ratio. They will invest for a while, but pull the plug after some arbitrary time if it doesn't hit the scale.

Exactly, which is the exact opposite of what AWS is doing. They have how many services that very few people use now? But at least they respect their customers and view the cost of running those services as goodwill for their customers.

They like to use small teams. I wouldn't be surprised if their least-used AWS product is still profitable (aside from brand-new stuff or obvious non-profits like Deep Racer). The idea is to get people into AWS and help keep them there. You don't do that by making life harder or unpredictable for your customers.

It's the opposite of what AWS is doing, but not what Amazon as a whole is doing. There was a recent article that said they're considering cost-cutting in the Alexa business unit [1].

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-...

Does it seriously take 10k people to make Alexa? And she's way dumber than Google. Yes, they should be cutting some costs.

Maybe it's one of those many-if-statements style AIs.

We prefer to call them decision trees. It sounds far fancier.

And that's not a bad way to move at least in the short term. The problem is that longterm, people will avoid your products pre-emptively for fear of them being vaporware. Especially with something as serious as cloud implementation in an organization. I would hate to be the guys who now have to rearch all their applications to go from GCP to AWS.

Because it's not profitable "enough". Presumably they'd like to reassign their engineers on projects that could make more money.

That makes sense in the abstract but of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of projects Google is currently working on, how many outside of Ads make a sizable amount of profit?

A mildly successful cloud provider would probably make FAR more money long term than the median Google product. Pulling the plug on GCP to build a couple dozen projects that will mostly get killed themselves seems like a huge waste, even without considering all of the negative externalities of burning even more customers by cancelling a major service.

Margin and expected future profits, I assume.

Breaking even doesn’t cut it since capital could be put toward something better. Unless it has some other strategic value (eg, bragging rights, growth potential, security, etc)

Pride? They want to be #1 or nothing at all?

If you look at the way profits are distributed in a category, this goal makes perfect logical sense. What percentage of ad-tech profits do you think Google gets from being #1?

Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to be #1 in every business you touch.