The Core

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will step down later this year, turning over the helm to the company’s top cloud executive Andy Jassy, the company announced Tuesday. Bezos will transition to executive chairman of Amazon’s board.

...  revealing an eye-popping $5.6 billion annual loss last year, but a nearly 50 percent jump in revenue...  But the division’s fast-growing revenues, second only to the search giant’s core ad business, suggest Google could become a major cloud player and fiercer competitor to Azure and AWS in the years to come.... In many ways, Google’s cloud business is going through the same growing pains its competitors once did; it took AWS nearly 10 years to become profitable for the first time, and it’s now a more than $45 billion annual business.

Google came into the cloud wars with an engineer’s vision of what the future should look like... Unfortunately for Google, most of the world is not run by or for engineers (yet?). They are run by executives at Fortune 500 companies... and Google was profoundly bad at selling to them. Google had to scramble to put up solutions which supported the “old way” of doing things, when enterprises wanted to lift & shift working environments into the cloud. Many of those products are mediocre...

Engineers want tools, but Fortune 500 executives want solutions. Google was unable to tell the story of how their new, modern tools could be put together to build new, modern solutions. [Google is working on fixing this]. This will likely turn things around for Google. Their technology is amazing, and now they need to turn that into sales.