The article makes the product look to be directed at Google Cloud customers, thus increasing its unique selling proposition over AWS and Azure.

AWS and Azure should provide direct support for U2F, too. It's an open standard; nothing stops either provider from doing that.

Sure. But the message I get is, "Now I can use Google's phishing resistant 2FA device to protect my Google Cloud account". It's like accessing Gmail via Chrome: you know, that it's the "official way".

It's a U2F token. It should be the official way. It's kind of a travesty if AWS doesn't have native support for it.

Fairly sure it doesn't unless it's really well hidden. In fact, if someone at Google really did happen to think 'doing initial rollout to GCP customers is going to make AWS look lame' and AWS stops dragging their feet on this, it would also be a good thing for everyone.

I would argue, that the entire GCP development model, as the late entrant's to the cloud market, is about making AWS look lame in comparison.

or are you saying "Hey, what a handy way to keep people invested in our Googleverse?"

How do U2F tokens accomplish that? It's an open standard; it is basically the open standard for modern multi-factor authentication.

I did not realize they were using an open standard.