This article is based on reporting originally published at fool.com (Motley Fool) in early 2020, drawing on market share data from Gartner and reporting by The Information. Market figures reflect conditions as of late 2019 / early 2020.
Google’s Cloud Market Position: The Paradox
Google owns the world’s largest search engine, the most widely used web browser (Chrome), and the dominant mobile operating system (Android). Yet as of the Gartner analysis cited in early 2020, Google Cloud controlled just 4% of the public cloud services market — placing it in fourth position behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud, which held approximately 48%, 16%, and 8% of the market respectively.
At the time, Google’s leadership reportedly expressed ambitions to become one of the top two cloud providers by 2023, according to reporting by The Information. Achieving that goal, however, required overcoming three significant structural challenges.
1. Management Instability and Internal Conflicts
Google recruited Diane Greene — co-founder of VMware — to lead Google Cloud roughly four years before this writing. Her tenure was marked by strategic disagreements with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, most notably around Project Maven, a U.S. Department of Defense initiative that applied AI to identify people and objects in imagery.
Greene reportedly wanted to retain the Project Maven contract as a significant revenue stream for the cloud unit. Pichai, facing intense internal employee backlash over ethical concerns about AI weaponization, chose not to renew it. Google ultimately formalized a set of AI ethics principles and withdrew from bidding on the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) — a $10 billion cloud contract that Microsoft eventually won.
Greene also pursued a strategy of bundling Google Cloud services with Alphabet’s other product lines. According to The Information, this approach created friction with other division heads and failed to convert major enterprise customers. Adding to the instability, Google Cloud’s COO Diane Bryant resigned abruptly after less than a year in the role.
Greene herself stepped down in early 2019. Her replacement, Thomas Kurian — a former Oracle executive — inherited a cloud organization that had lost momentum while AWS and Azure continued to accelerate. Kurian moved to expand Google Cloud’s enterprise sales force and made targeted acquisitions, including migration-tool maker CloudSimple, but the question remained whether these moves were sufficient to close a widening gap.
2. Missed Strategic Acquisitions
Unlike its major cloud competitors, Google did not aggressively pursue acquisitions to build out its cloud platform. This restraint proved costly on multiple fronts:
- GitHub: Greene reportedly sought to acquire the code-hosting and collaboration platform, but the proposal did not advance internally. Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, immediately gaining deep integration points with enterprise development workflows.
- Red Hat: IBM acquired the open-source enterprise software company for $34 billion, significantly strengthening its hybrid cloud capabilities — a model many enterprises prefer.
- MuleSoft: Salesforce acquired this integration platform developer for $6.5 billion, extending its reach into enterprise data integration — a market increasingly important in multi-cloud environments.
At the time of writing, Alphabet held approximately $121 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities — ample capital to have pursued multiple large acquisitions. The restraint left Google Cloud without the enterprise software hooks and developer mindshare that competitors were actively acquiring.
3. Privacy Concerns and a Lack of Enterprise Leverage
Alphabet’s core business model depends on targeted advertising fueled by data mining — a fact that creates a structural trust deficit when approaching enterprise customers in privacy-sensitive sectors like healthcare, finance, and government.
This tension surfaced directly in 2019 when Google Cloud’s agreement to store patient data for Ascension Health hospitals drew widespread scrutiny and triggered a federal investigation. A pending acquisition of Fitbit — intended to accelerate Google’s presence in digital health — also faced Justice Department review. These high-profile concerns gave regulated-industry buyers additional reasons to favour AWS or Azure, whose parent companies derive comparatively little revenue from advertising and data monetization.
Beyond trust, Amazon and Microsoft each had structural leverage Google lacked:
- AWS benefits from a first-mover advantage, a vast service catalogue, and a reputation for reliability that many enterprises built their architectures around.
- Microsoft Azure can bundle cloud services with Office 365, Windows 10, and a deep enterprise software sales motion — relationships that go back decades. Microsoft is also a natural choice for retailers competing with Amazon’s own e-commerce business and wary of giving AWS further data on their operations.
- Google Cloud, by contrast, had no comparable enterprise software suite to bundle with its infrastructure offering. Its strongest competencies — search, advertising, browsers, and Android — offered limited leverage in selling enterprise cloud contracts.
Where Google Cloud Has Real Strengths
Despite these challenges, dismissing Google Cloud entirely would be a mistake. The platform has genuine technical differentiators worth recognising:
- Kubernetes and container services: Google invented Kubernetes and remains a leader in container orchestration. This gives Google Cloud a credible foothold with engineering-led organisations adopting cloud-native architectures.
- Data analytics and AI/ML tooling: BigQuery, Vertex AI, and related services are genuinely competitive offerings in the data platform market.
- Global network infrastructure: Google operates one of the world’s largest private fibre networks, which can translate to performance advantages for globally distributed workloads.
- Competitive pricing: Google has historically used pricing aggressively as a lever, offering sustained-use discounts and per-second billing models that put pressure on competitors.
The Path Forward: Can the Gap Be Closed?
The structural obstacles Google Cloud faces — trust deficits in regulated sectors, a lack of enterprise software bundling, and a slower start on acquisitions — are real but not insurmountable. The levers available include:
- Targeted acquisitions in enterprise software or security to fill capability gaps
- Aggressive price competition to dislodge workloads from AWS and Azure
- Doubling down on niche technical strengths, particularly in AI/ML and containerisation
- Building explicit data-use boundaries and compliance certifications to address privacy concerns in regulated industries
Under Thomas Kurian’s leadership, Google Cloud began reporting revenue separately and showed accelerating growth. Whether it can close the gap with AWS and Azure — let alone surpass them — depends on consistent execution over a multi-year horizon, not just product capability.
For DevOps engineers and architects evaluating cloud platforms, Google Cloud’s technical merits increasingly stand on their own. The competitive dynamics at the corporate level are real, but workload fit, tooling integration, and total cost of ownership should drive platform decisions — not market share rankings alone.
Market share figures and financial data cited in this article reflect publicly reported information from approximately late 2019 to early 2020 and may not reflect current conditions.