> You don't really synergize social media with cloud infra.
I think your first-mover and competitive industry points stand, but I don't see how retail and search synergize better with cloud infra than social. The cloud infra business model is (as far as I can tell) just building general purpose computing-at-scale features in a reusable, billable way and selling those to consumers. VM/container/database/serverless/etc orchestration isn't more aligned with retail than other businesses as far as I can tell.
Well with retail you are kind of already in the business of buying and selling hardware, so to me it doesn't seem that big of a stretch. In both you are handling big volumes with very high emphasis on cost-margins.
Search, yeah. Intrinsically maybe not, but Google has some very skilled engineers and researchers, who have pioneered a lot of the modern cloud applications/algorithms eg Borg/k8s, MapReduce, GFS and so on. So they have the know-how on how to build topnotch services, just not maybe as good business-savviness to sell them.
I think your first-mover and competitive industry points stand, but I don't see how retail and search synergize better with cloud infra than social. The cloud infra business model is (as far as I can tell) just building general purpose computing-at-scale features in a reusable, billable way and selling those to consumers. VM/container/database/serverless/etc orchestration isn't more aligned with retail than other businesses as far as I can tell.