There's not much detail in that. But, you could certainly read it in a way that using Hashicorp products might be lower friction than using other products on GCP.
This is a genuine collaboration effort by two of the players whose services many people are already using together, and they are making that experience better for their users.
The kind of dismissiveness and hyperbole in your comment is why we can't have nice things.
The reason we can't have nice has much more to do with naivete than paranoia when the paranoics are right.
You say this is not tinfoilism, but the tinfoil in this one is strong.
I don't think they have anything to do with each other. My point is that we know some weird things are happening and it's a put-down and a conversation stopper to call someone a tinfoil hat wearer.
(The best you can say is that the person you're insulting might have a mental illness.)
This is a pet peeve of mine because I knew about some of the hijinks that have gone down (and are going down) since before Snowden flushed his life down the toilet to get people to pay attention and I've been dismissed with that exact term. It's naive in a post-Snowden world to not postulate conspiracies.
You concern is probably worthwhile, but I think this is not an example of it.
We, like HashiCorp, cooperate with Google on a lot of things.
They don't pick winners. What works best for Google is to get your workload into GCP. It matters little whether the bits you run are Pivotal bits, HashiCorp bits, Docker bits, Red Hat bits, IBM bits, Microsoft bits or your own bits.
What matters is that they're being processed on GCP atoms.
The analogy I have used before is that Shell, BP and ExxonMobil don't care whether you burn their fuel in a Ford or a Toyota. They mostly care that you burn their fuel.
I don't mean to paint a cynical picture here. As a partner Google is excellent, responsive and respectful, our engineering cultures have good compatibility and there are deep common interests. But Google's goal is to make GCP the most attractive place to run your workload. That means that they are going to be ecumenical. They want to help us to win, but they want to help everyone to win, because that helps them to win.
I 'm not sure where you're coming from or going with this. Do you have an example to illustrate? What are you considering collaborators and non-collaborators?
What exactly is your problem?
Actually I'm more worried about how Facebook and Amazon treat non compliance, but Google sure seems to be getting shadier every day.
This combined with the W3C evolving into a corrupt entity just makes me want to get out of tech completely. Maybe if I could get some awesome dev job at the EFF?