Oversize #3: Google Cloud wants to win big in India

Why read this story?

Editor's note: “The best thing about me is me”, with apologies to Ricky Martin, could well be Google’s tagline. For long the company created (or acquired) products that went on to become the default choice in their domain—search, advertising, online videos and even email. The company was built around building great products and then having customers line up. But that’s not how enterprise solutions work. Marketing, winning deals and managing customer relations, especially with larger corporations, is an entirely different ball game. Chief information officers and technology heads don’t care about fancy app showcases, they want an approachable pitch with better sales partners, customized contracts and real support. In the years since Google entered the cloud computing market, it’s remained a distant third behind Amazon Web Services, or AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure. For a company that has a tendency of dropping products that don’t give it a dominant position, this is an irksome position indeed. In fact, The Information reported in December 2019, the top brass at Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. debated exiting the cloud business entirely, during meetings in 2018. …