It would take talent for them to mess up hosting businesses who want to use their TPUs on GCP.

But then again even there, their reputation for abandoning products, lack of customer service, condescension when it came to large enterprises’ “legacy tech” lets Microsoft who is king of hand holding big enterprise and even AWS run rough shod over them.

When I was at AWS ProServe, we didn’t even bother coming up with talking points when competing with GCP except to point out how they abandon services. Was it partially FUD? Probably. But it worked.

>It would take talent for them to mess up hosting businesses who want to use their TPUs on GCP.

there are few groups as talented at losing a head start as google.

DEC, Sun, Intel, Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia: More talented in that area!

Google employees collectively have a lot of talent.

A truly astonishing amount of talent applied to… hosting emails very well, and losing the search battle against SEO spammers.

Well, Search had no chance when the sites also make money from Google ads. Google fucked their Search by creating themselves incentives for bounce rate.

> It would take talent for them to mess up hosting businesses who want to use their TPUs on GCP. > But then again even there, their reputation for abandoning products

What are the chances of abandoning TPU-related projects where the company literally invested billions in infrastructure? Zero.

Enterprise sales and support takes a lot of people skills, hand holding, showing respect for the current state, being willing to deal with and navigate the internal politics of the customer, etc.

All things that Google is remarkably bad at.

I don't know what scale of "billions" you're talking about; but, Intel blew 1–2 billion on Larrabee. Even worse: Intel blew 5+ billion on mobile pre-iPhone. I remember when that team was shown the door — that's when we had to evaluate the early RGX GPUs as a backstop to try to win Apple's business; the RGX's were turds.

Penny-wise pound-foolish.

Intel also wasted untold billions trying to compete with Qualcomm building cellular chips with lackluster results and the sold the division to Apple which has spent billions more just to end up with the lackluster C1 in the SE.

Bit of an aside but Larrabee didn't fail. Intel inexplicably abandoned the consumer GPU market but the same tech was successfully sold to enterprise customers in the form of Xeon Phi. Several of the largest supercomputing clusters have used them.

https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20...

There is plenty of time left to fumble the ball.

And they already did many times.