Google Cloud Platform serves up some of the most advanced, bleeding-edge technology of any hyperscale technology provider. So why does it have just 9% of the public-cloud market? What sane enterprise wouldn’t greedily hoard the tech that made Google the third-richest company on earth? Enterprises that move at the real-world speed of a Buick rather than a Hennessey Venom F5.

Google’s focus on the future makes it a winner in consumer tech and a pie in the sky to enterprise cloud customers.

“For a long time that’s been one of their biggest problems — they’re focusing on what’s next rather than what is today,” said Corey Quinn (pictured), cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. “And they’re inventing the future almost at the expense of the present.”

The folks in Mountain View, California, aren’t dim-witted. They know they have to start speaking the enterprise language to grow their market share. At the Cloud Next conference in San Francisco yesterday, Google signaled it’s ready to meet customers where they are with ready-to-wear products. It is tackling a main enterprise concern — hybrid and multicloud — with new offerings like the Anthos platform for managing applications across environments.

“It’s almost like they’re growing up now and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to realize that customers matter — not just the tech or the future,'” said John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. 

Quinn and Furrier, along with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, spoke at Cloud Next. They discussed Google’s uncertain transition from developer darling to nuts-and-bolts enterprise provider (see the full interview with transcript here).

Google stops talking and starts listening

Google Cloud has typically had a problem syncing with enterprises on some very basic matters, according to Quinn. “And GCP’s formal deprecation policy says, ‘We’ll give you one year’s notice before turning anything off once it goes [general availability],'” he said, “That’s no time at all for an enterprise.”

Few enterprises can move applications in that time frame.

What is Google’s answer to this quandary? “It usually starts with, ‘Well, actually,’ and then they reach for a whiteboard to show me exactly why I’m wrong, and then I lost interest and wander off, at which point they realize, ‘Wow, you have no attention span for anything — would you like to work here?'” Quinn said.

Google is now pivoting toward the Amazon Web Services Inc. golden rule of listening to customers, according to Furrier. It is hiring salespeople and partnering with legacies such as Cisco Systems Inc. and VMware Inc. to reach enterprises.

Gambling on a game change

If Google manages to productize its geek-ware into something that satisfies real market need, it could gain ground with businesses. “They don’t have a lot to lose by changing the game, changing the rules,” Furrier said. “Amazon’s certainly in the lead. Google can just kind of catch up pretty quickly if they make the right moves.”

Its latest serverless stance, however, displays a familiar deafness to on-the-ground business problems, Miniman noted. “It’s very much Knative — we’re going to take your containers and Kubernetes and extend it serverless,” he said. “That’s not what I hear from customers that I talk to today that are doing serverless.”

If Google wants to keep hammering away at Googling the enterprise, it certainly has the funds to do so.

“We always say, ‘The best tech doesn’t always win.’ And that’s true,” said Vellante. “But, usually, the best tech runs out of money or they give up. I don’t see that happening — at least in the midterm or even semi-long-term for Google. So I do think they have the chops to grind it out.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of Cloud Next:

Photo: SiliconANGLE