Google's sustained use discounts for standard (non-preemptible) VMs are a huge win as well. No need to predict usage and reserve instance time in advance; the discount is simply applied progressively as you use a particular instance type more during a month.
That's nice, I'm using azure for a windows vm and it's been super frustrating trying to get reasonable performance. (RAM/CPU/etc. is all great but the standard IO is so slow it's basically unusable (i'm maxing out at 10M/s (I think due to iops limitiations).
Why is GCP (just like AWS and Azure) still 5 times more expensive than comparable dedicated cloud services from competitors?
I can get this https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 in a few hours, with more performance than anything you offer for even 5 times the price. Same at most other dedicated hosters.
Do you even ever intend to be price competitive?
Another point is, Google's VMs are generic CPU/RAM combinations. You don't need "network optimized VMs" or "storage optimized VMs" - you simply get those things on any VM. This makes the "excess instance supply" market much more fluid and simplifies folks' lives.
Happy to discuss further!
(work at GCP)