No. I don't work for Google but that earlier unfortunate piece from the inaptly named "The Information" represents a complete misinterpretation of management-speak and a fundamental misunderstanding of cloud market dynamics.
Google will be in the "cloud" business until the heat death of the universe, but what "cloud" means and where the respective monsters go looking for their next meal and how much capital they put into what kind of hunting is going to continue to change and evolve.
For many businesses that are eg large market-like B2B plays I would be more worried about greedy AWS looking up at me and deciding they would like my position and a larger share of my sweet, sweet revenue stream. Those mofos are apex predators and understand there is no problem that cannot be solved with another API.
These are interesting times, but for commodity cloud consumers there is no future in which Google suddenly decides that with the hundreds of billions of capitalized data center investment it makes sense to "shutdown" its cloud business. This is not Reader.
Google will be in the "cloud" business until the heat death of the universe, but what "cloud" means and where the respective monsters go looking for their next meal and how much capital they put into what kind of hunting is going to continue to change and evolve.
For many businesses that are eg large market-like B2B plays I would be more worried about greedy AWS looking up at me and deciding they would like my position and a larger share of my sweet, sweet revenue stream. Those mofos are apex predators and understand there is no problem that cannot be solved with another API.
These are interesting times, but for commodity cloud consumers there is no future in which Google suddenly decides that with the hundreds of billions of capitalized data center investment it makes sense to "shutdown" its cloud business. This is not Reader.