It's always surprised me that Google took so much longer than Amazon to offer a cloud computing solution. I think one of the reasons is that Amazon's strategy is to sell the infrastructure it builds to offer its own products- whether that's AWS for its technical infrastructure, or its ecommerce platform.

While Google is certainly a strong contender, I wouldn't underestimate that importance of a strong high-level strategy. And Amazon knows this. Commodification of cloud resources is a risk to AWS and thus we see an increase of 'serverless' infrastructure from AWS that tries to differentiate from competitors.

Anyone else think it's a bit bizarre that of all the stories in the "new" tab on HN, the only ones with any points upvoted are the two fawning over Google?

This is a pretty regular occurrence if you check the new tab.

I see three upvoted, only one of which had to do with Google, so, I think what you saw was just a momentary coincidences not some kind of fundamental reflection of HN attitudes.