Microsoft beat Google to second in cloud because it already had a strangle hold on a sizable portion of the enterprise computing market, not because executives at important companies (large enterprises) knew Google has a reputation for killing obscure consumer products. Microsoft already had relationships with many large and medium businesses/organizations, often spanning multiple decades, a business software ecosystem, and an army of salespeople, account managers, and support people, making the transition to cloud a natural next step.

Google, on the other hand, has had to build these relationships from scratch with it’s only advantage being advanced software and infrastructure which reduce costs.

Disclaimer: I work at Google opinions are my own

AWS doesn't have cheap Windows licenses, MSSQL, Office, and Active Directory. They're still beating Azure. Because they were first, of course -- but the point is that true competition is all about playing to your advantages and mitigating your disadvantages. Google had enormous advantages and squandered them. Maybe Microsoft's advantages were genuinely stronger, but from where I'm standing it looks like Google didn't even try.

I've seen the AWS vs Azure vs GCP drama play out a few times, once on a team with significant Microsoft legacy and twice without. In my judgement, the MS legacy, even at its most potent, was a smaller consideration than Google's unmitigated weakness, every manager's worst nightmare: the concrete risk that Google would cancel something and the manager would get blamed for not seeing it coming. Maybe I've just been blessed to work at non-dysfunctional companies where non-technical management asks the opinion of technical management on technical matters, but technical management is highly cognizant of this risk and has been for a decade.

My recommendation would have been to go on offense. Make AWS's constant over-promising and under-delivering a meme. Make Microsoft's we-have-altered-the-deal-pray-we-dont-alter-it-further enterprise pricing a meme (compare to: google and gmail are still free). Build counterveiling fears in that technical manager's mind, no lying required, because Amazon and MS earned those criticisms and they earned them hard.

Now it's probably too late. Too bad. So it goes.

>Google has a reputation for killing obscure consumer products

It has a reputation for killing cloud products like classic VPNs in GCP too, a significant part of our cloud infrastructure. Distrust is earned in this case.

The second mover was Azure, which launched two years before GCP (Compute Engine) did.

App Engine did launch earlier, but that was not a general purpose AWS competitor.

I’d be interested in hearing your argument for that being the reason why Azure is beating GCP in marketshare. The conventional wisdom that Azure can do Windows for cheaper than everybody else and has an easier time getting enterprise customers they already have a relationship with onboard always made sense to me.