Despite a solid product offering, Google Cloud Platform is struggling to find its audience.

Comparing the big three cloud providers is like measuring high performance sports cars— you can argue over the subtleties of various models but ultimately they are in a completely different class to a Toyota.

Among these cloud titans, while AWS has sped off into the distant future, there’s fierce fighting for second and third place — and it’s a race Google is currently losing.

On the surface, this table makes my argument look baseless— GCP grew by 100% in 2016. But percentage comparisons only work when sizes are roughly similar. It’s a $22 billion marketplace that’s exploding and Google only has $500 million of this pie. Microsoft is 3 times the size and Amazon is 20 times larger. Even Alibaba (they have cloud!) has displaced Google in terms of revenue share.

A peek at the 2017 numbers should also make Googlers worry:

The smaller players are shrinking. Amazon’s percentages are hard to compare when their presence is so massive but among the rest, Microsoft is clearly running away for the number two prize in cloud.

In this massive market the runner-up prize in cloud is a big deal. There are some companies that simply won’t use Amazon, mainly because it’s seen as a competitor or other clouds might be a better fit for the existing tool-set. Microsoft has launched a formidable full scale assault in the “anyone but Amazon” space which has been staggeringly successful, and Google is frankly stalling.

Google was the original global scale, high-availability platform — it should easily take the crown in this business. Graphs aside, I also hear from clients and other cloud practitioners the growing pessimism about whether they will continue to use GCP. So what is going wrong?

Google is not enterprise enough.

Back in 2010, I was a huge Google Apps fan and spent much of my time convincing companies to drop Office and head to the browser. I even wrote a freaking book about Google Apps, in between foaming at the mouth at how Google Apps would soon be eclipsing Microsoft for all email and productivity.

In my blind optimism, the reasons for Google’s glorious victory in Apps were obvious compared to Office:

Browser-based, OS-independent and self-updating.

Ground-breaking real-time editing mixed with online integration.

Gmail versus Outlook is like a typewriter versus a stone tablet.

Cheapness.

And, boy, how wrong was I! People looked at me like I was insane. Google Apps just never gained a serious foothold. Years later, Microsoft got mildly aggravated that Apps was stealing single-digit market share and crushed it with Office 365, which is now the lion share of SaaS office usage.

How did that happen? Office 365, if you’ve been lucky enough to use it, combines the worst of Outlook, a dramatically reduced feature-set of Office and none of the cool things about Google Apps. And yet corporate users have flocked to it in droves.

When I ask corporate execs why they went with Microsoft, the answers are always the same — 365 offered a natural upgrade path, an evolution for users, didn’t cost anything for existing licenses and it was blessed by their IT. In short, it was an enterprise upgrade, and the underlying tone was Google wasn’t really enterprise enough.

And in a nutshell this is the same problem with Google Cloud. If you go to the conferences, look at the marketing materials and check out the partner eco-system, they are simply not effectively targeting an enterprise audience. It’s techie, it’s nerdy, it’s academic, it’s esoteric, and whatever technical advantages they have over the competition are being completely ignored by the large adopters and eclipsed by competitors.

Does it matter? Emphatically, yes. You need the large corporate customers for volume, revenue, scale and ultimately the credibility that gets you more large customers.

An Enterprise IT Provider? Or daycare facility?

Google needs to stop retiring products.

I am 100% sure that DynamoDB is not going away in the next 10 years. But honestly I am not at all sure that FireBase will be around by next quarter. And this is a really common concern I hear from companies: “Yeah, Google <insert product name> is great but are they really committed?”

It’s a direct side-effect of overly-aggressive retirements in recent years, from great ideas nobody used (Google Wave) to okay-ish software everybody used (Google Reader) and critical software that people built businesses around (Insights for Search). Even fantastic products have no development for a decade (Google Voice). iGoogle, Google Talk, Google Health, Picnik, Google Buzz —all gone, gone, gone. It’s a virtual graveyard.

The acceleration between “This is the future” and “Nah, we’ll killing it” has reached the point where soon they’ll be launching and retiring in the same sentence. “We pleased to announce our new beta and you have until December to download your data before shutdown.”

And then there’s the zombie product problem, as shown by Google+. Is it dead, alive or what? There has been conflicting official quotes from Google executives saying they are shutting down… nope, now it will be “more focused” —wait, we haven’t given up yet, it’s still around. Is this any way to treat a platform that was officially launched to compete with Facebook? There are even articles on how to delete your Google+ account without affecting Gmail, that’s how screwed up this is.

Google at its core has a major Product Management problem that directly impacts its cloud adoption. Companies will not commit to your platform when you shut down services unpredictably. Both Amazon and Microsoft understand this and have a solid track record of supporting their cloud products.

Google’s infamous retirement ‘strategy’ makes every product look like a hobby. (If you think this is overstated, just ask anyone who built software around Google Realtime API.)

Google is not a sales company.

Google has the most successful advertising platform in the world but if you’ve ever used AdWords you’ll see it was designed by developers not marketers. The average company struggles to launch AdWords campaigns and use the core Google product that literally everybody wants, so much so that Google once launched AdWords Express to solve the problem (it didn’t).

Facebook, on the other hand, has shown how to sell pretty much the same product to non-techies and has built a wildly successful platform that average companies can use. Google missed this huge opportunity because it’s not a sales company and I’ve seen this over and over in various launches.

Case in point: the Google Next conference last year was the only tech conference I’ve ever seen that became cheaper as the date approached. You could buy a $1500 ticket six months ahead or wait until 2 weeks prior for an identical $500 ticket (admittedly with a widely distributed vendor discount). From airlines to music concerts, nobody operates this way. It created zero buzz for the event and flies in the face of the scarcity model of marketing. (For comparison, try finding a discount coupon for re:Invent.)

The same happened with Premier and Standard network tier pricing confusion. Instead of launching the Google-network backbone as a premium upgrade, it was presented (bizarrely) as a standard network option downgrade. You wouldn’t believe the number of people I spoke to who thought Google had increased the price of its network service and didn’t understand what it was. It would be like if AWS had announced Glacier but left customers with the impression that now you pay for data you need immediately.

In cloud, AWS and Azure have enterprise-grade sales efforts with entire vendor ecosystems ready to sell for them. Dealing with these companies, from a sales perspective at least, looks and smells just calling the big tech companies of yesteryear and, at a certain size, target customers like the familiarity. It’s all new but it feels just the same. By comparison Google’s sales effort is amateurish at best.

Google is not a support company.

Google practically created the idea that software doesn’t need support — Gmail has no 1800 number and it doesn’t need one because it’s simple to use and always works. It’s easy to forget before Google, software pretty much always came with support. Unfortunately, this same approach doesn’t work with cloud.

As with many Google products, their free (read: developer) cloud support tends to focus on thinly-contributed user forums rarely visited by Google engineers. The couple of times I ventured into GCP for work projects, when I hit arcane snags (like the phantom database disconnection problem), I quickly realized I would never get an answer and went running back to AWS.

I know, I know, all cloud vendors have terrible documentation and spotty support. But when I turn to the developer’s official fire extinguisher, Stack Overflow, you can see there isn’t much support for GCP there either, which only amplifies the need for Google to provide more support.

Google Cloud doesn’t know what it does better.

Google Cloud does many things better than either Microsoft or Amazon, but don’t expect Google to tell you what they are.

Again, Google Next (their cloud conference) is firmly stuck in the “isn’t cloud great?” conversation of five years ago, whereas attendees should have had their eyelids taped open to be brainwashed into the awesomeness of their AI powerhouse. Instead the audience was given once of the worst tech keynotes in Silicon Valley history and I remember exactly none of the announcements.

Seriously, Google’s AI and deep learning tools absolutely demolish the competition so why isn’t this the primary message we’re hearing? “We’ve got per-second billing now,” they meekly announced — days after Amazon beat them to the punch (Google actually implemented sooner but lost the PR battle). Seriously, where is the value in the race to the bottom for cheaper virtual servers? Dammit, show us your cool toys!

Even simpler tools like FireBase aren’t promoted as differentiators. Building the equivalent of FireBase in AWS is not trivial (and why would you?). A Cloud Guru’s tutorial on building a video sharing website shows how mindlessly easy it is to use Firebase. It’s a great, great product with broad application. But frequently all I hear is that it’s too expensive (really?) and massive unexpected price changes last year screwed some devs.

What’s next for Google Cloud?

I once worked with a former Google exec who said the company struggled to focus on anything not on the first page of its revenue charts, which I thought explained its casual attitude towards cloud. Seeing as advertising is upwards of 90% of the entire company’s revenue, that might make sense when their cloud sales are so small.

But as an enormous Google Fanboy, it pains me to see this. Amazon doesn’t ignore AWS because its real focus is on retail, and Microsoft isn’t making Azure a side project because of Windows and Office. It should be possible to overcome these hurdles since the technology is good and the infrastructure is there.

Unfortunately, I’m not hopeful. People are excited about AWS and there’s significant, growing chatter about Azure. Where are the people boasting about Google Cloud Certifications? Who can’t wait for the Google Next 2018 conference? GCP has the feeling of a niche provider that is going backwards at a time when the major clouds are iterating features at lightning speed.

Reluctantly I find myself taking pause with Google and more routinely using AWS for everything. With limited time to learn new tools and clients who want dependable enterprise-grade solutions, it’s not a platform I talk about much anymore. But I’d love — just love — for Google to prove me wrong because I’m still their number one fan.