That being said, despite the old wives tale that AWS came about because Amazon decided to sell its excess capacity, AWS was started as a separate initiative with completely different infrastructure when Amazon wanted to enter a separate vertical. It was led by Jassy (not technically from a business development standpoint) - a sales guy who looked at the market and went after a need (I refuse to say by “Working Backwards”). Every initiative that Amazon and AWS has starts with the business case, six pagers, PRFAQ’s etc with product managers and program managers involved. I even had to do a couple to get “funding” to spend time on a couple of features to a popular company sponsored open source solution I wanted to work on.
Being successful in the cloud is all about building relationships, knowing how to meet large organizations where they are, not being stuck on “the one true way”, developing and grooming a network of “partners”, etc. It’s very high touch. Microsoft has been doing that since the 80s and AWS had first mover advantage.
I won’t speak to GCP in particular. But none of the above characteristics is part of Google’s DNA.
>But Google should have never been so far behind in Cloud.
I emphatically agree. Google had kick ass infrastructure way before most players and squandered it on internal use only. I think it's one of the biggest blunders in its history and shows the lack of vision in places.