AWS had a helluva head start.

Not only did GCP (and Azure, etc.) have to catch up with where AWS was 8 years ago, they've got to invest even more to catch up with where AWS is now.

It's obvious that GCP is a very long-term investment, but also one that it not just purely profit-driven for GCP in isolation, but also hugely strategic for Google as a whole.

> Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1]

Here's the question to ask: if Google stopped investing aggressively in marketing and building new offerings to expand the Cloud userbase could it be profitable today?

Or in other words, is it better to have 30% YoY growth and on paper profitability, or 45% YoY growth and an on paper loss, with the ability to flip the switch and move to the first option whenever you want?

If they stopped spending on product and infrastructure build out, they could maybe be profitable at an instantaneous point in time. The issue is that Azure and AWS will continue developing and that will drive the market. Google share will erode and they will not be profitable again.

Is that really the case here? Is Google's marketing holding them back from profitability? Is GCP spending more on marketing than building useful products & expanding their infrastructure?

> 30% YoY growth and on paper profitability, or 45% YoY growth and an on paper loss, with the ability to flip the switch and move to the first option whenever you want?

This sounds suspiciously like a line from the WeWork documentary on Hulu.

Well its a common refrain when discussing startups and high growth business. I'm basically quoting the (ultimately correct) argument about AWS and Amazon as a whole from a decade ago. People were concerned about Amazon not being profitable (or being just barely profitable) for a long time. And then eventually they decided to be profitable.

Exactly. The difference between WeWork and Google Cloud is that WeWork has an unproven viable market, whereas cloud computing has competing, larger players. (If you are implying that GCP could collapse like WeWork)

It is reasonable to ask, I am just giving a possible answer.

> Given that I expect to never see waymo brand cars shuttling people around, most likely they will license out the tech to companies who deal with customers or to the car companies themselves.

I'm a big supporter of what Waymo is doing, but I've always thought this is real end game for them precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. Google is incredibly shy of anything that involves physical support and running a robotaxi service requires a lot of it along with operations/logistics. They are no Amazon.

? It's core customers - businesses who are looking to advertise - are very well served by Google.

Yes! If you factor in businesses running ads, and even Google search usage for work-related tasks, you could argue that Google is skewed B2B. In the long run, I think MS and Google have the same goal: serve businesses a buffet of services they need to operate: productivity, cloud, ads.