I worked in Cloud from 2015-2023. I was personally hired by Amit Singh, who was the first "CEO" of "Cloud", back when it was just "Google Apps" + GCS/GCE/GAE.

I worked in Cloud from 2015-2023. I was personally hired by Amit Singh, who was the first "CEO" of "Cloud", back when it was just "Google Apps" + GCS/GCE/GAE. About 8 months later Diane Greene was brought in to scale the business because the org under Amit was too googley. Literally. Google's legacy culture of engineering meritocracy and ICs who vote with their feet on the "best" projects was not conducive to becoming an enterprise technology company. Diane brought in Diane Bryant as COO (from Intel) and PH Ferrand as sales president (from Dell), and while PH gave it a good try on the GTM side, Diane left after barely 6 months and there just wasn't enough enterprise experience across the org to make things work. Diane was likely brought in at least partly because she is googley, and her VMWare history probably looked like enterprise software success, but she was too googley to turn the ship and he org flailed for a couple more years. Then the board appointed TK, who absolutely knows 100% how to sell to enterprise. He spent 2 years almost exclusively hiring senior staff from outside: Microsoft, SAP, AWS, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, etc, and rebuilding something that looks roughly like if Microsoft went back in time 20 years. The upsides are that the business has grown mightily and Cloud is now almost exclusively market driven, at least on core products/services. The downside is that he broke the culture and alienated thousands of googlers whose advancement opportunities were essentially eliminated. Because of the hiring needs, the bar is much lower now, cronyism is prevalent, and politics+bureaucracy get in the way of progress. During my years at Google, I sat in The Quad, Tech Corners, Moffett Park, and then back at Tech Corners, and spent time in many of the rest of the bay area offices. I will state with confidence that the Cloud offices do not feel "googley" when you walk around the cube spaces. There are few decorations, no buzz, not many people who appear to be enjoying themselves, very few tech talks, guest speakers or events, etc. Just taking a walk around the MP, Matilda or TC campuses and then visiting YT in San Bruno or one of the Android teams in MTV is a stark difference. Cloud is not googley. Let's see if the consumer-oriented PAs can keep that alive.