Google's play seems to be to encourage more and more folks to learn CS and be interested in learning programming and AI. Google Research, GSoC, PhD research grants, publishing their results in leading journals, and their OSS contributions all point to a company that is a friend of programmers and academics. For these very reasons, the company is viewed very positively outside of SV.

On the contrary, I don't see a similar desire to contribute back from Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Netflix (although the last 2 do contribute a ton to OSS).

Most of googles evangelization of tech and AI is a marketing and adoption strategy for google compute engine. Which is fine, but it should be seen for what it is

Disclaimer: I am personally benefiting from a long-term Google educational programme.

My response to this is: so what? Of course they're going to encourage new developers to use their products - it's only natural they'd teach their own stuff and not AWS/Azure. Developers aren't really influencers (sadly) in the purchasing for cloud infra so I'm not sure that it's a straight up marketing campaign.

Google was publishing very important distributed computing papers and other research even when they didn’t have cloud offering in mind.

It’t a great hiring strategy, as many researchers prefer to work at a company where they can get recognition from publishing academic papers.

30 seconds googling yields....Amazon (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazons-own-ma...), Apple (https://opensource.apple.com/, https://github.com/apple/turicreate)