I pretty much agree with you, although I think it's more organic than planned. But both Google and Microsoft offer various configuration options on their enterprise SaaS offerings that are intended to protect you from abuse of their own products (Google's setting to disable submission to external Google Forms while logged into a Google Workspace account is a prime example, reactive to the very heavy use of Google Forms for phishing). That shows a degree of, I'd call it, self-awareness that they are part of the problem, and are offering tools to solve it to their customers.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not conspiratorial enough to think that they created this situation on purpose, but now that it exists they sure are benefiting from it... and that undoubtedly reduces incentives to allocate more resources to abuse prevention/response at the source.
I mentioned in a footnote in the article my anecdote about a university switching to G-suite, more or less because of a serial abuse problem originating with gmail. That's not the only reason of course and there were institutional politics, cost optimization, etc involved... but to be quite honest I personally feel that Google has various ways to strong-arm universities into G-suite that are reprehensible and an abuse of taxpayer/tuitionpayer dollars. In my opinion, and at that time, even constraining ourselves to the inevitability of going SaaS the Microsoft 365 offering was both superior in quality and more cost-effective (given specific requirements of the institution like desiring interop with on-site AD and US data custody agreements... YMMV). Microsoft was also amazingly easier to work with from a pre-sales perspective, with a very accessible sales rep who got quotes and answers to detailed engineering questions very quickly, including setting up some meetings with customer engineers to plan architecture. Google was, well, more or less a brick wall... we spent more than 5 months waiting for an updated quote at one point (we were looking for some features that Google said they offered but not on their published pricing, although it later became questionable whether they even offered them).
I don't want this whole thing to turn into a rant, but, well, the university chose Google, and it really felt to me like that was largely a result of some fairly dirty tactics by Google that involved leveraging their partnerships with other academic software vendors to basically box the university out of features of other products it used if it did not select Google. Google and the vendors presented this to us in a way that made it feel remarkably intentional (i.e. the vendors were surprisingly candid that they offered integration only with Google due to commercial incentives). I also felt that Google was outright deceptive about their pricing and capabilities at points, although it felt like it came mostly from the incompetence of their sales staff (promising before they found out if they could deliver, which did not happen until post-contracting). At the time I wondered if any of this rose to a possibly actionable violation of state purchasing regulations but from my perspective now I doubt it... nonetheless it was an extremely frustrating experience that left me with a very negative impression of Google's enterprise offerings and business practices, despite their products generally being more polished and user-friendly than Microsoft's (although frankly I feel that for the last two years or so Outlook Online has surpassed gmail in terms of UX, Microsot has visibly put a lot of work into it and Google has done little except for somehow make it slower).
I suppose Google's success in the enterprise has not changed the fundamental observation that Microsoft gets enterprise sales and Google does not. Google just has the bluster and name recognition to sell anyway.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not conspiratorial enough to think that they created this situation on purpose, but now that it exists they sure are benefiting from it... and that undoubtedly reduces incentives to allocate more resources to abuse prevention/response at the source.
I mentioned in a footnote in the article my anecdote about a university switching to G-suite, more or less because of a serial abuse problem originating with gmail. That's not the only reason of course and there were institutional politics, cost optimization, etc involved... but to be quite honest I personally feel that Google has various ways to strong-arm universities into G-suite that are reprehensible and an abuse of taxpayer/tuitionpayer dollars. In my opinion, and at that time, even constraining ourselves to the inevitability of going SaaS the Microsoft 365 offering was both superior in quality and more cost-effective (given specific requirements of the institution like desiring interop with on-site AD and US data custody agreements... YMMV). Microsoft was also amazingly easier to work with from a pre-sales perspective, with a very accessible sales rep who got quotes and answers to detailed engineering questions very quickly, including setting up some meetings with customer engineers to plan architecture. Google was, well, more or less a brick wall... we spent more than 5 months waiting for an updated quote at one point (we were looking for some features that Google said they offered but not on their published pricing, although it later became questionable whether they even offered them).
I don't want this whole thing to turn into a rant, but, well, the university chose Google, and it really felt to me like that was largely a result of some fairly dirty tactics by Google that involved leveraging their partnerships with other academic software vendors to basically box the university out of features of other products it used if it did not select Google. Google and the vendors presented this to us in a way that made it feel remarkably intentional (i.e. the vendors were surprisingly candid that they offered integration only with Google due to commercial incentives). I also felt that Google was outright deceptive about their pricing and capabilities at points, although it felt like it came mostly from the incompetence of their sales staff (promising before they found out if they could deliver, which did not happen until post-contracting). At the time I wondered if any of this rose to a possibly actionable violation of state purchasing regulations but from my perspective now I doubt it... nonetheless it was an extremely frustrating experience that left me with a very negative impression of Google's enterprise offerings and business practices, despite their products generally being more polished and user-friendly than Microsoft's (although frankly I feel that for the last two years or so Outlook Online has surpassed gmail in terms of UX, Microsot has visibly put a lot of work into it and Google has done little except for somehow make it slower).
I suppose Google's success in the enterprise has not changed the fundamental observation that Microsoft gets enterprise sales and Google does not. Google just has the bluster and name recognition to sell anyway.