Why? The article gives convincing reasons that an iPhone monopoly was a threat (because Apple could gatekeep everyone's mobile experience) but those don't apply to cloud services. If Amazon and Microsoft had a monopoly on cloud services, how would that hurt Google's core businesses?

Because of scales of industry. They have to keep investing into their own data centers to keep their services (Google, YouTube etc.) competitive. Because Amazon has the largest cloud business they can afford to spend the most on theirs. Half the reason Google search is so hard to compete with is because of their investment into those data centers. YouTube has also long been the fastest most reliable video hosting site which makes it attractive to viewers and publishers thanks largely to Google investments in CDNs. Also, right now much of the features of things like Google Assistant, Lens and Translate rely on powerful server infrastructure.

If anyone has an edge on them in the cloud they can possibly come out with competitive offerings to theirs similar to how companies using TSMC has done to Intel.

I disagree, Amazon's or Microsoft's cloud services dominance doesn't impact how Google makes nearly all of its money: advertising.

Cloud isn't just cloud.

Google's infrastructure is a cloud, the only thing a competitor needs is the software / services to replace Google. And a lot of them are already there, being recreated.

That's why they want in, because Google & co. could easily become the next television.. Its still there, but most people don't care about it any more because of a shift in technology and the way people use the internet.

In 5 - 10 years cloud might be much more important. Besides, Google has to get away from relying on advertising as fast as possible, because of looming regulation.

If you look at the finances from last earnings call, most of the income for Google is still Ads, and even though Google Cloud is showing growth, I would be interested to see the real Infrastructure and human investment vs revenue. Either way Cloud business is so huge that Google don't need to be 1st or 2nd, just need to be there and Ads will continue fueling their other ventures

I don't remember where I read it, but if we count YouTube and Google Play / Services (incl firebase), would Google Cloud be as big as Azure, then?

Why would you count YouTube as part of GCP? YouTube presumably make most of its money through advertising.

Not in terms of revenue that YouTube or Play generate, but in terms of YouTube / Play being a customers of GCP, themselves. In the sense that Amazon are one of the biggest AWS customers.

> in terms of YouTube / Play being a customers of GCP, themselves

I don't believe that's a true characterization; not any more correct than considering Search to be a GCP customer. Not true technically nor in terms of revenue booked. A more accurate description would be GCP and YouTube both are built on top of common Google infrastructure (Borg, storage, networking, monorepo/dev infra, etc.)

No idea how true is the latter either, Amazon being an AWS customer.

It isn’t. I listened to a podcast episode of “screaming in the cloud” where a GCP engineer said that only a few internal Google tools are hosted on GCP.