I'm a Cloud xoogler (2015-2023), too, and I'm not sure whether that would have made things easier or harder. There were quite a few "shiny object" solutions Cl

I'm a Cloud xoogler (2015-2023), too, and I'm not sure whether that would have made things easier or harder. There were quite a few "shiny object" solutions Cloud commercialized from other parts of Google/Alphabet over the years, and regardless of all the organizational duplication, fiefdoms and chaos that accompanied having three Cloud CEOs in six years, I think the commercial interest via Google's "innovation story" and One Google pitches created a lot of value. As a third place laggard until TK was hired, Google Cloud didn't really have much of interest to offer beyond the legacy internal data products (BigTable, BQ, Spanner) and GKE/Anthos, so having things like Google Maps, several Verily products, a few things that emerged from Brain/RMI, Google Health, etc made a real difference. That said, I think Cloud has matured enough that it would now be a good time to consider spinning it off, especially as the regulatory environment around Search & Ads is heating up again in multiple countries. It would be much better in the long term to have Cloud separate; not as good as if Search & Ads were separate but I don't think that's really viable without enormous costs and much difficulty.