A look back at Diane Greene's tenure as Google cloud boss: a struggle to catch up with AWS and Azure, and tension with Sundar Pichai on Github and Project Maven
- Google poured resources into its cloud unit during Diane Greene's three-year run at the helm, but the company has still struggled against Amazon and Microsoft. Tweets: @carolcriner , @javi , @quinnypig , @asynchio , @markcallaghan , and @dhh . Thanks: @mattrosoff Tweets: Carol Criner / @carolcriner : Negative “inside baseball” picture at #Google . 1st reaction - wish this journalist had not fueled stereotypes. 2nd reaction, #Google is definitely building momentum as a player in the enterprise space. Yes, tracking behind MS and AWE. Nonetheless, a serious player. http://twitter.com/... JaviAir / @javi : Same. Sad to see how stagnant Fabric has become since acquired by Google... http://twitter.com/... Corey Quinn / @quinnypig : In an alternate universe we'd see a GitHub —> Google Git —> G Git for Domains —> Google Cloud Git —> “An Update on Google Cloud Git” drama play out over the next two years. http://twitter.com/... Joseph Jacks / @asynchio : .@GitHub will be a $100B+ asset for @Microsoft in < 10 years. $7.5B was a very good / well priced deal. http://twitter.com/... @markcallaghan : Google had a nice alternative to Github and shut it down in 2016. I lost some work history when that happened — wiki pages and repos from the Google MySQL effort are gone although I might have them archived somewhere. http://twitter.com/... @dhh : Google bid $6 billion for GitHub, but wouldn't up the offer to counter Microsoft. I wouldn't have said this a few years ago, but I'm glad Microsoft won the bidding war. Grave risk Google would have lost interest in 6 months after the next exec rotation. http://www.cnbc.com/... Thanks: @mattrosoff
Context & Ripple Effects
Greene arrived in late 2015 when Google bought her startup Bebop and handed her all of its cloud businesses (the appointment framed her VMware pedigree as the answer to Amazon's head start). Three years later, this retrospective lands as the verdict: heavy investment, real momentum in enterprise accounts, but Google Cloud still tracking behind AWS and Azure.
The piece also surfaces two internal fights that shaped the era — Greene losing the GitHub bidding war to Microsoft after refusing to raise Google's $6B offer against Microsoft's winning bid, and the employee revolt that ended Project Maven. Both decisions now read as inflection points for the cloud race.
First-order effects
- Greene's exit hands the cloud unit to new leadership inheriting a third-place position despite three years of resourcing, making enterprise credibility — not technology — the stated problem to solve.
- The Maven retreat leaves Google without a marquee government AI reference while AWS and Azure compete for defense work unencumbered by comparable internal revolts.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's $7.5B GitHub acquisition locks the developer community into the Azure orbit — the exact asset Google declined to contest — compounding the very gap this retrospective documents.
- The Pentagon work Google walked away from comes full circle: by 2021 it is aggressively pursuing a major Pentagon cloud and AI contract, signaling that the employee-outcry calculus has been reversed at the top.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hyperscaler competition settles into a structure where enterprise trust is bought through acquisitions and executive pedigree rather than built organically — and where internal culture becomes a measurable competitive liability, not just an HR story.
- The GitHub outcome shows deal discipline cutting both ways: refusing to chase an asset can hand a rival a durable moat, pushing future platform wars toward earlier, more aggressive bids for developer mindshare.
The trend: The cloud market is consolidating around enterprise-first execution, where developer platforms and government contracts — not consumer-company DNA — decide who trails and who leads.