Google’s Cloud Chief Aims Higher

Software ▶ The company is building data centers and recognizing mistakes ▶ “How do I find these needles in all these thousands of haystacks?”

Google pretty much invented the technology behind the cloud. Its cloud software’s AI and data analysis remain far beyond Amazon.com’s or Microsoft’s. A little surreal, then, that on March 23 Chairman Eric Schmidt had to stand on a stage in front of thousands of cloud developers and lecture them for 20 minutes about the strengths of Google’s internal software and why its products deserve another look.

While Google created many of the cloud’s fundamental software and data analysis tools as early as the 1990s, Amazon was the first to commercialize them a decade ago, with Amazon Web Services. Two years later, Google’s sluggish response, the Google App Engine, forced clients to let it directly manage their use of computing resources instead of allowing them to rent a certain amount of space or power. (Snapchat is App Engine’s only big mainstream customer.)

“There was something fundamentally wrong with my conception,” Schmidt acknowledged in his March 23 remarks,