Except how profitable is Google's cloud? It lost 480 million last quarter.
AWS made 5.2B last quarter.
Google is selling at cloud at a loss to gain market share while it's biggest competitor is raking in profit. Sure, you can burn money and gain market share. But would anyone pick Google for a long term partner on any product? I sure as hell wouldn't. They have a tendency to simply discard products left and right. The support is non existent. Why tie yourself to such an unreliable partner?
I tried looking up one for Amazon or AWS projects, but only unrelated news articles came up.
I don't really have a horse in the race, though, since all three of the big platforms (and others like Oracle Cloud) are outside of my price point and all my personal projects run on smaller simple VPS providers. From what I can tell, there is not a single large corporation out there with the commitment to never kill a product of theirs and support everything in perpetuity.
These are weak reasons. They may have been at 90% over the last few years but things are quickly changing.
The fasting growing cloud? 6% in five years after pouring in billions now they need to start charging what it costs. The more unprofitable of the cloud vendors.
Chrome is still the most popular free browser. Not sure that matters as much as it once did.
I think the change in sentiment is that the sky is no longer the limit for Alphabet. Meta lost that notion big time, and Amazon is so so too. Apple and Microsoft might still be in the "sky is the limit" category, or at least in another category than the other 3.
Microsoft would have become IBM, if not for Satya Nadella. He completely rejuvenated Microsoft after Ballmer's reign.
Microsoft successfully transitioned into cloud computing with Azure, Office 365, and Teams. They dramatically improved their image among developers/open source with WSL, Typescript, VS Code, and their GitHub acquisition. Now it seems they caught Google completely off guard with respect to AI productization.
There are stated costs, and real world costs. It wouldn't be hard for Azure to be far better than AWS on some metric, say better free support, or I guess better paid support too.
My guess is the impact of the poor tech is quite low if your scale is small and you are not all that technical yourself. A good option for smaller less Eng focused customers.
Steve Ballmer stepped down in 2014. If we're giving credit to CEOs for things that happened while they were CEO (which isn't really valid), Azure was launched in 2010 and Office 365 was launched in 2011, both during Ballmer's tenure.
The statista statistics are almost immediately covered by a subscribe for access popup. Search seems to be doing as you say in general, but also is loosing share on desktop to bing, where edge would be the most relevant competing browser.
Search hovers around ~90% for the last several years: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Google Cloud is growing faster than Azure & AWS for the last few years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i....
Cloud was at ~4% market share 5 years ago, now it's at ~10%...
Android is the only major product doing somewhat poorly, and this is mostly due to Apple just completely crushing it with the iPhone.
I get that Google is the company everyone loves to hate, but the sky isn't falling on this company yet.