Google’s technological achievements are hard to ignore. While Google Cloud still trails behind AWS and Microsoft Azure in total market share, its growth rate is leading the pack—especially impressive given how late it entered the game. It’s easy to assume that Amazon’s early dominance and Microsoft’s deep roots in enterprise IT would have sidelined Google Cloud long ago. Yet here it is, thriving—largely thanks to its growing prowess in artificial intelligence. Its latest Gemini models are even being compared favorably to OpenAI’s GPT-4 in complex reasoning tasks, signaling that Google’s momentum is very real.
At the heart of this momentum is what Google has always done exceptionally well: solve computer science problems most companies wouldn’t dream of tackling. Whether it’s pioneering technologies like Kubernetes, developing frontend frameworks like Angular, or building internal tools like Bazel and Zanzibar, Google regularly transforms its research breakthroughs into tools and services that shape the wider tech ecosystem. These technologies eventually surface in Google Cloud or become open source, available for others to adopt and adapt.
But just because Google built it doesn’t mean you should use it. Many of the tools and systems Google engineers rely on are built to support problems at Google’s extraordinary scale. Most organizations, frankly, don’t face those same issues. Emulating Google’s approach can easily introduce unnecessary complexity. Technologies like Zanzibar and Spanner are built for tens of thousands of engineers and globally distributed systems—not your average enterprise app. What works beautifully inside Google can be wildly misaligned with the needs of a team of 50 or even 500 developers.
That’s not to say Google Cloud’s offerings have no place in your stack—far from it. Tools like BigQuery, Vertex AI, and the Gemini platform offer powerful capabilities tailored to real-world enterprise challenges. But when it comes to internal tools or architectural philosophies, it pays to remember that your company isn’t Google. You don’t have a monorepo spanning millions of lines of code, nor an army of site reliability engineers enforcing standards. As one developer bluntly put it, some of these tools are “a mosquito with a sledgehammer.” Before reaching for Google’s tech, ask whether you’re solving Google-sized problems—or just creating them.