That's true.. but Amazon and BizSpark do not have the accelerator requirement* . Considering that those are Google Cloud's direct competitors, it's a fair question why they have that requirement when their competitors don't.
* (both programs give addtl resources if you're in an accelerator though - amazon portfolio package and bizspark plus respectively)
The eligibility criteria is not something specific to Google .
Almost every cloud hosting provider has similar criteria, and I think it makes sense from their perspective that a Funded/ Accelerated startup is more likely to become a paid customer .
How much of Google's cloud stack are you required to use to apply for this program? If they require you to use GAE for your backend for example, I think it's going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of startups.
Google doesn't use data stored in GCP for their own purposes any more than Amazon uses data in AWS or Microsoft uses data in Azure.
That said, it's completely understandable that companies don't want to help fund competitors. --Walmart knows that they could use AWS without having any real fear of Amazon employees looking at their data to get a competitive advantage, but they chose Azure because Microsoft is not a direct competitor.
Likewise, companies providing healthcare software look at what Google is doing in that space and they don't want to fund the competition by using GCP.
These are rational decisions that we would expect companies to make. It's actually more surprising that, for example, Netflix still uses AWS given the fact that Amazon is a direct competitor in the streaming business. --GCP or Azure would make more sense here unless Amazon is giving them a really good deal to keep their business.
Amazon and Microsoft uses AWS and Azure themselves. Google doesn't use GCP, the service you buy is not the service Google engineers use internally. This both means that GCP cannot bill the rest of Google to inflate their own numbers and that GCP likely are less battle tested since they don't have a huge internal customer.
1. Because it is a very different thing to have an internally managed cloud than it is to offer this as a product with the massive support required for enterprise, something that Google has never put much resource into.
Amazon and MS have vast support networks because enterprise wants to feel like they have some control and feedback on their systems.
Also, unless you can innovate in the space (or go really cheap), why would I ever choose a smaller player over a larger one?
This is another example of the problem these rich companies have where cash is not a problem but identity and direction is.
Google is dumping money into their enterprise programs. They hired some experienced people to run it. Their offerings are soooo much better quality than AWS. Try getting a GPU vm with a local SSD on AWS, does not exist... In GCP I can set custom values for CPU, MEM, GPU, SSD. Try to ssh to a machine, and then one without a public network connect.
Google is the only provider with a good portal to their partner program. They can actually communicate and we now have a dedicated account rep.
Their cloud platform is the same thing: trying to not get pushed out by Amazon and Microsoft.
Google Cloud is about ensuring that those two have competition and can't somehow pull an EEE. Extreme scenario: vast majority of world's online businesses are hosted on AWS and Amazon for whatever reason creates their own AWS ad service and forbids or undercuts Google AdWords for everything hosted on AWS.
I'm totally impressed with gcloud. Slick, smooth interface. Cheap pricing. The fact the UI spits out API examples for doing what you're doing is really cool. And it's oh-so-fast. (From what I can tell, gcloud's SSD is 10x faster or 1/10th the cost of AWS.)
And this is coming from a guy that really dislikes Google overall. I was working on a project that might qualify for Azure's BizSpark Plus (they give you like $5K a month in credit), and I'd prefer to pay for gcloud than get Azure for free
I think the point is that a lot of the products and services wouldn't work outside the Google Cloud platform without a significant amount of underlying infrastructure to support it, such that it would be very difficult to just provide some ready to go package for people to buy and implement themselves.
Regardless of the TOS saying that or not (I haven't read them), I can think of at least two reasons why your statement doesn't hold:
1) AI startups usually don't have a lot of value to potential acquirers based on their data, but based on other things (e.g., talent, customers, business model, platform, brand). That's like saying you shouldn't use AWS because Amazon can just steal and commercialize all your data.
2) There are other companies than Google that acquire startups
Having said that, I highly doubt that Google can just use all the training data to on GCloud to launch their own products with that. They can surely look at it and maybe do stuff with them internally, but I am pretty sure that they can't use them commercially.
* (both programs give addtl resources if you're in an accelerator though - amazon portfolio package and bizspark plus respectively)
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