I think Google gets the public cloud. What they struggle with is lower margin, revenue driven, customer obsessed businesses. First, it's important to understa

I think Google gets the public cloud. What they struggle with is lower margin, revenue driven, customer obsessed businesses. First, it's important to understand unless you're buying ads from Google, or renting their machines, you are not their customer. Users are inventory and they spend a lot of money trying to procure inventory (users) for their customers (advertisers). When you look at it through this lens, you can see how Google as an institution can tolerate experimenting with ideas that are disconnected from revenue models and dropping failed ideas like hot potatoes. It makes sense for them to behave that way. Amazon's services are almost always designed with either a concrete or direct path to revenue upfront and they have a huge customer support infrastructure they can tap into. They move a little slower in certain areas of R&D because customer obsessed businesses are tolerant of deprecating technology when it doesn't work out. That means they'll do more market research, take less risks and focus on tenaciously steady growth rather than trying to always hit it out of the park. When choosing a vendor, it's important to understand how their offerings affect the solvency of their business and whether it fits into their core competency. In this case, Firebase's prices were too low. That should have been a warning sign. The other warning sign is Firebase is a such a small percentage of Google's revenue, Google doesn't have a huge incentive to fix customer service issues.