Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms.
If Google used market research from Cloud customer usage patterns to bolster its Android products, then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on our door with (more) antitrust action and calling for a breakup of the company.
Similarly, I'd be surprised if Samsung uses its foundry customer data for market research for its smartphone segment.
> Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms.
GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).
Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.
> then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on our door with (more) antitrust action and calling for a breakup of the company
This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.
As I've mentioned on here before, Competitive Intel is SOP for all companies, and every largeish (post-Series D) company has a CompIntel department under their PM or PMM org.
> GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).
> Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.
This is patently false. Thomas Kurian reports directly to Sundar Pichai, who is both the CEO of Google as well as Alphabet.
While Kurian likes to refer to himself as the CEO of Google Cloud, that's as much a vanity title as Susan Wojcicki's former title of "CEO of YouTube" -- neither has been an independent company during their tenure, under the Alphabet umbrella or otherwise. (YouTube was once an independent company... pre-acquisition almost 20 years ago.) All Google Cloud employees are Google employees, just as all YouTube employees are Google employees.
> This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.
I never said it was corporate espionage. However, it is potentially anti-competitive behavior to use data (market research, whatever you want to call it) from one product to boost another. (Context matters.)
Are you familiar with the EU's Digital Markets Act, which recently went into effect? Google is designated as one of the "gatekeepers" by the European Commission, and the act itself reads:
> The gatekeeper shall not use, in competition with business users, any data that is not publicly available that is generated or provided by those business users in the context of their use of the relevant core platform services or of the services provided together with, or in support of, the relevant core platform services, including data generated or provided by the customers of those business users.
While GCP and other cloud platforms have not yet been explicitly designated as core platform services by the European Commission, it's only a matter of time before that happens.
Samsung holds the patent and all the IP for OLED displays.
The moment a Samsung competitor is large enough, they move to them. For example, switching from Samsung foundaries to TSMC by 2018.