For the entirety of its existence, the vast majority of Google’s revenue has come from online advertisements, but that may change within the next five years. According to Google’s Urs Hölze, the revenue generated from the company;s cloud services will surpass that of its advertising services by 2020, which is a bit ambitious considering how much the company is struggling to compete with Amazon.
At today’s Structure event in San Francisco, Urs Hölze, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, predicts that within the next five years, Google’s Cloud Platform revenues could surpass its advertising revenue. “The goal is for us to talk about Google as a cloud company by 2020,” Holze said. It’s an ambitious plan for a company that is typically thought to be lagging behind Amazon Web Servces (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in the cloud computing market. Hölze didn’t flinch at the comparison. Instead, he defended Google’s position by comparing this to the early smartphone battle between iOS and Android. The iPhone was first, but Android is now the world’s most used operating system. Time will tell, but it’s usually unwise to bet against Google.