I think the main reason they lag behind is because the service is perceived as worse. Amazon and Microsoft have well-established customer-development practices

I think the main reason they lag behind is because the service is perceived as worse. Amazon and Microsoft have well-established customer-development practices and they learn and resolve customers' issues. Having a good accessible support function is a great start to start listening to your clients but somehow in google culture they only want to look at aggregate statistics of a large userbase to learn something that customers are already trying to tell them through non-existing support channels. For example, I've heard engineers complain about bad instances and intermittent networking issues. Concerns that I have never heard about in AWS except in the very early days of it. I haven't looked at GCP in a long time, but I remember everything being very python-centric and very lightly documented. Winning in technology often comes down to having a serious customer-centric product management function.