Right, I don't think they have to directly attack anyone. It's just a matter of tradeoffs - here are the things the Google Cloud gets us, here's a specific example that hones it in, and here's why that's critical to our business.
At the moment, the blog post just says, "Yay we moved to the cloud" and threw out some marketing buzzwords. It should be beyond a shadow of doubt that they got a lower price as a result. That's ok - now give us the details! On a product level, what made Google Cloud so compelling that you were willing to move your entire infrastructure to it? That question really wasn't answered, and is really the biggest thing, as a customer, I'd want.
Right now, I'd have to call Spotify as a reference in order to do to get that answer, which again allows them bring the price lower. Not necessarily democratize the information.
Spotifier here. Frankly, price is not the biggest factor in a decision like this. If we were going for the lowest cost cloud option, it probably wouldn't be either AWS or Google - there are other providers who are hungrier for business that would be willing to do deep cuts at our scale.
The way we think about this is that there are basically two classes of cloud services: commodities and differentiated services. Commodities are storage/network/compute, and the big players are going to compete on price and quality on these for the foreseeable future (as with most commodities).
The differentiated services stuff is a bit more interesting. Different players have different strengths and weaknesses here - AWS has way, way better capabilities when it comes to administration and access control and identity management, for example (which is actually pretty important when trying to do this in a large org). The places were Google is strong (data platform) are the places that are most important for us as a business.
Compelling: dataproc+gcs, bigquery, pubsub, dataflow
Made it safe: high-enough quality, cheap enough.
I would categorize data tooling as a moving target - we have some, it's never enough, it probably won't ever be enough. It's a moving target (p.s. obligatory we're hiring!).
More generally speaking, (excuse me for being a little hand-wavey here) many of the AWS offerings feel like polished, managed versions of familiar tools. Redshift, for example, feels a bit like "hey we figured out how to abstract away a bunch of mysql instances to feel like a big processing cluster". That's not a bad thing, necessarily. The google stuff feels much more intentional - "we need to solve the problem of doing these sorts of queries at scale" vs. "we need to solve the problem of scaling mysql to solve these types of queries"
Maybe they're just better at abstraction, but whatever - that works for me!
At the moment, the blog post just says, "Yay we moved to the cloud" and threw out some marketing buzzwords. It should be beyond a shadow of doubt that they got a lower price as a result. That's ok - now give us the details! On a product level, what made Google Cloud so compelling that you were willing to move your entire infrastructure to it? That question really wasn't answered, and is really the biggest thing, as a customer, I'd want.
Right now, I'd have to call Spotify as a reference in order to do to get that answer, which again allows them bring the price lower. Not necessarily democratize the information.