How Google Learned to Embrace Its Inner Oracle
A tripling of its salesforce. Heftier sales commissions. More rigid product road maps. Thomas Kurian and Robert Enslin have spent the past two years shaking up Google Cloud, but the company still hasn’t budged from third place in the cloud services market.
Thomas Kurian wasn’t pleased. In mid-2019, a few months after Kurian had joined Google, the internet giant’s cloud computing service suffered a series of outages, including one that took down several of Google’s own services, along with those of major customers like Snap and Spotify.
Kurian—CEO of Google Cloud—and others believed that personal coding projects of Google engineers may have played a role in destabilizing the company’s cloud service. He penned a memo to staff with the title “Reliability Reset” telling employees they needed to take more seriously the impact their actions had on Google Cloud’s customers, according to three people who saw the memo. While his words would have been unexceptional at business software companies like Oracle, where Kurian worked for 22 years, they didn’t go over well in parts of Google, which has long had a reputation for indulging top-flight engineers.