Some media sales-people would be super comfortable selling enterprise stuff (because a bunch of them started at MS/Oracle/Sun etc).
The front-of-house salespeople would be fine, so you'd just need to hire the back-of-house sales-people (normally the more technical ones).
The real problem is that Marketing and IT are very different departments, and it's hard to change contacts in one area into opportunity in another (I think this applies to both Google and FB).
But mostly, to answer the titular question: it's about margins, nothing else. There's less money in cloud than in ads. So, like Google, they'll probably do something like this when investors start to worry about the ad market.
Sure but it's rare to successfully transition. The ad market is very political and depends on connections, not product. Google salespeople are also known as "order takers" since they don't really need to sell, companies always buy them by default.
It's the opposite in enterprise tech where Google is the underdog and needs to do quite a bit of selling, and base it on the strength of the product and functionality. GCP is hiring strongly for enterprise/software sales experience but struggling with the leadership to use them effectively.
There's plenty of margins in cloud though. AWS has proven it and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads business, but I agree that it's not currently as lucrative today.
Some media sales-people would be super comfortable selling enterprise stuff (because a bunch of them started at MS/Oracle/Sun etc).
The front-of-house salespeople would be fine, so you'd just need to hire the back-of-house sales-people (normally the more technical ones).
The real problem is that Marketing and IT are very different departments, and it's hard to change contacts in one area into opportunity in another (I think this applies to both Google and FB).
But mostly, to answer the titular question: it's about margins, nothing else. There's less money in cloud than in ads. So, like Google, they'll probably do something like this when investors start to worry about the ad market.