I disagree. Google could be extremely strong here. Both SAP and Oracle are essentially a database with a web- and UI framework and a few example apps. They are

I disagree. Google could be extremely strong here. Both SAP and Oracle are essentially a database with a web- and UI framework and a few example apps. They are "dBase in the (locally-hosted) cloud", evolved 10 years. And yes, a few of the example apps delivered with the DBs are certified for certain financial purposes, which Google wouldn't have. But Google has quite a few parts of this already in place. Google has got the database, Spanner. It's even supposed to solve a major problem that both Oracle and SAP are currently lacking. Massively distributed transaction speed: if you want a webshop, but you're the 1000lb gorilla of your industry, you need to support tens to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. And you'd love to do this by just "BEGIN TRANSACTION <blabla> ... COMMIT", right? Well, mostly you can't do that. Oracle and SAP have always worked by providing faster single machine hardware and are not really ahead of Spanner in clustering. Let's assume Spanner marketing and academic papers actually tell us what Spanner can do. That it can run transactions, distributed, at greater speed than anything else. Apparently they can run transactions at "double the speed of light" (apparently they don't need a cluster roundtrip to confirm a transaction, just a one-way message). Hell, maybe they've got a patent on this technique. Second they HAVE one of the biggest business ventures of the planet running on this platform (Google Ads), and clearly working. So they have a strong argument that it can work very, very reliable. They've got all sorts of useful stuff integrated on top of this solution. BigQuery querying, you don't even need to configure or admin read-only replicas, those come free. Plus whatever Google cloud ML does, another area where Oracle and SAP probably can't ever match Google. Companies want this. If they can get the computational power of Google cloud behind their core database, it would have clear advantages. Oracle and SAP are both building this sort of solution, but that is not their strength. They can never approach the machine power Google has. So if Google built a dBase-like (hopefully a bit more modern) frontend on top of Spanner, make it accessible for administering huge businesses, and implement 100 example apps (warehouse management, basic (ie. ignoring the law) personnel administration, the hated hours tracking, ...) on top of Spanner, you have a solution that could be pretty tempting for huge businesses and would be a subscription based service that people seriously overpay for. The reason you need those 100 example apps is that they're not just 100 example apps. They're a standard data format (so for instance, any employee tracked in personnel admin doesn't need to be entered again in hours tracking. Warehouses and stock, administered by different apps, already have an interface between them sharing data, ...) They can compete here if they want, and while they're lacking one thing, they're very strong (some might say unbeatable) on another front. This can be made to work with not even that much effort. You are of course correct that it would take 10 years to build out this business, and that would be considered very fast. But it can be done.