I don't think that's the right analysis. Amazon and Google both offered cloud products at about the same time. Amazon had based their business on building out and provisioning tons of "plain vanilla" linux boxes, and then layered a virtualization interface on top. So that's what they offered.
Google had build a highly customized, scaling environment based on their own software layer instead of mere "linux boxes". And clearly it worked great for them. So that's basically what they offered with GAE.
But the problem in the market was that GAE was this weird custom thing, while Amazon was selling a "cloudy" version of the same environment all the developers were already using. So Amazon won -- the market wants linux boxes, even if they aren't as scalable or efficient uses of hardware as Google's stuff.
The point is: Amazon won by circumstance. They happened to have an internal product already that they could sell, and they did. Google had an internal product too, but for reasons beyond the control of its designers, it wasn't a good fit for the market. I don't think either of these has anything to do with being "great at doing business".
I don't know about "doing business" in general but as someone who is a very big fan of both Google and Amazon and who uses lots of services/products from both (but not Adwords as an advertiser), I know I would much rather deal with Amazon when it comes to anything related to customer service.
The thought of dealing with Amazon customer service fills me with warmth. The thought of dealing with Google customer service fills me with dread.
I love Google as long as everything is working, but they (still) really suck when you need to interact with them. And before anyone mentions it, yes, I know this is because "I am Google's product", not their customer, but ultimately that viewpoint seems to have become part of Google's culture and in many ways that does actually make them lesser than Amazon at "doing business", IMO.
Well, even when you're not Google's product - eg you've got paid-for top-tier GAE support - you still can't get 24/7 support, and the system is pretty much completely opaque, and able to be crashed by a single user consuming too many resources (I have caused this).
They're going to need to turn this around if they want to compete with Amazon, who have been very accommodating and helpful to us, even going so far as to send engineers to our offices to help us with aspect of our architecture.
Amazon did not get lucky with their products. They developed them over a number of years, constantly adapting to customer demands and trying various different types of services. Being able to do this is a luxury that start-ups cannot afford, they need to get lucky with their choices, but Google could have done it.
I wasn't making a GAE vs. AWS comparison though. GAE is not in direct competition with AWS. It's a product with a niche market and I wouldn't see it as a failure. It's just something else entirely than building an AWS competitor.
The argument I was making is that Google wouldn't necessarily have the experience in building a lean, scalable business operation that could successfully compete with Amazon Web Services. As a case in point, Google has been running an exact duplicate of Amazon S3 for a while now, but it has yet to really take off.
http://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage.html
> Amazon did not get lucky with their products. They developed them over a number of years,
EC2 and S3 today are virtually identical to the services they launched with. I don't think reality bears out your contention.
You're right that they had to add EBS later, but I think if anything that supports my point: the ephemeral "instance store" model was too weird, and customers really wanted something that acted like a virtual hard drive with persistent storage.
Google had build a highly customized, scaling environment based on their own software layer instead of mere "linux boxes". And clearly it worked great for them. So that's basically what they offered with GAE.
But the problem in the market was that GAE was this weird custom thing, while Amazon was selling a "cloudy" version of the same environment all the developers were already using. So Amazon won -- the market wants linux boxes, even if they aren't as scalable or efficient uses of hardware as Google's stuff.
The point is: Amazon won by circumstance. They happened to have an internal product already that they could sell, and they did. Google had an internal product too, but for reasons beyond the control of its designers, it wasn't a good fit for the market. I don't think either of these has anything to do with being "great at doing business".