I wouldn't say that it's doomed to failure but I do think it has a lot of ground to cover to catch-up. Google has a lot of great technology like TensorFlow, Kubernetes, and Go that will keep them relevant.
In support of my flippant remark I see three indicators that hold parallels to Betamax with detail to follow. I qualify that it is largely informed by my own anecdotal experience. Specifically by objections and responses that I've received/observed while myself and peers have proposed or implemented cloud adoption at various companies.
Indicators
1. market share.
2. proprietary tech stack.
3. technical superiority syndrome.
Detail
1. Currently AWS has a major lead, then Azure, then Google. The implication is that market share translates to mindshare, which in turn yields blog articles, OSS libraries/tools, etc. This becomes a virtuous cycle.
For .NET shops that marketshare will tend to favour Azure on the premise that MS knows best.
2. Some of Google's technology stack has a learning curve that is unique to Google. Take GAE as an example and compare to AWS's nearest equivalent Beanstalk (or Heroku). Beanstalk requires few if any changes to an existing application whereas GAE requires that you do it the App Engine way. It might provide a number of benefits, but it's invasive. Containers are shifting the requirement, however not everyone is in a position or has the desire to start with containers on day 1.
Further Google Cloud's project oriented approach while not a bad organisation mechanism detracts from learning. If you assume the premise that exploration is part of learning it forces the user to hold two items in their head: their objective and Google Clouds imposed objective.
AWS on the other hand generally provides defaults that allow you to launch resources almost immediately after sign-up. Google's approach is better for long-term support, maintenance and organisation but the user needs to have the maturity to understand that benefit.
3. It may be technically superior but that statement in of itself is divisive and can shudder some away. It is not enough to simply be technically superior and from my observation the statements tend to originate from X/Googlers.
A number of people will latch onto feature set (for beta, number of films available was a factor). The absence of features will often discount a choice out of the gate (even if those features are irrelevant) as an example:
- regional coverage:
AWS - 15 regions/~38 zones
Azure - 36 regions/zones
Google - 6 regions/18 zones
- partially/fully managed services: AWS is continually growing these, at a level that seems to outpace competitors.
- Outwardly Google appears to tackle the "hard problems" with technically superior solutions (e.g. TensorFlow, BigQuery) but often appears to neglect the "boring" problems a number of companies want as well (e.g. Cloud VDI's, SnowBall, etc).
- Some areas seem to be ossified due to tight coupling (e.g. servlet 3.0 and python support in GAE).
Summary
There is no silver bullet solution. Every provider will have an outage at some point and this could be a big reason that GCE won't be knocked out of the game. I also think Google is working really hard to build community and mindshare. I don't have a crystal ball so only time will tell what happens but technical superiority has rarely been the sole reason that drives adoption.