Place your bets: Google Cloud Platform head Diane Greene told attendees at the Forbes CIO Summit last night that she thinks Google can overtake Amazon Web Services in the public cloud by 2022.
According to Forbes, she’s betting on Google’s investments in artificial intelligence and its world-class infrastructure to close the gap with AWS, which has a sizable lead in the infrastructure-as-a-service market over both Google and second-place Microsoft’s Azure unit. As of earlier this year, AWS controlled 40 percent of that market, more than Microsoft, Google, and IBM combined.
While a lot can happen in five years, it’s going to take a lot more than cheerleading to see Google overtake its Seattle rival in the cloud market, and Google’s AI products within Google Cloud are going to have to be substantially better than anything from its competitors — who are also investing heavily in AI and infrastructure — to entice switchers down the road.
“Google is just built for having the most technology,” Greene said, according to the report. I’m not sure how well this argument plays with CIOs while out on sales calls; how can you have the “most” technology? Google’s problem in the cloud has been sales and support, not technology.
