Diane Greene will teach Google to sell to companies; work on Bebop will continue at Google
Context & Ripple Effects
A month after Google named Diane Greene head of all cloud businesses and bought her startup Bebop, the Wall Street Journal fills in the shape of the deal: Greene will advise on selling to companies rather than run day-to-day sales, and Google will keep building Bebop in-house. The hire is a bet that VMware's co-founder can import enterprise credibility Google lacks against AWS.
What follows across the corpus shows the bet playing out unevenly — a 2016 profile has her retooling Google's cloud services for business customers, before her tenure closes with a handoff to Thomas Kurian.
First-order effects
- Greene takes an advisory mandate to teach Google how to sell to companies, while Bebop's development continues inside Google under her watch.
- Google's existing cloud businesses now report into a structure built around a founder-CEO whose reputation rests on enterprise software, not consumer scale.
Second-order effects
- AWS's dominance forces the retooling effort: by mid-2016 Google is reshaping all of its cloud services for business customers, and by 2017 it is testing enterprise-facing products like Google Hire with outside companies.
Third-order effects
- The arc ends with Greene stepping down as Google Cloud CEO in early 2019, replaced by Oracle's former product development president — evidence that importing an enterprise leader was not enough to close the gap with AWS and Azure amid tension with Sundar Pichai over Github and Project Maven.
The trend: Google's cloud business has spent years trying to buy enterprise DNA from outside founders, and the Greene-to-Kurian handoff marks the shift from celebrity hires to operational leadership.