The Trillion Dollar Tech War

As the data-intensive Internet of Things becomes a reality, the cloud is shaping up to be the biggest business opportunity in a generation, and Amazon, Microsoft and Google all want to claim the biggest slice

- Alex Konrad

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels expects AWS to become as big as the company’s retail business

For months and months, as Google’s brain trust searched for the ideal candidate to lead the company’s come from-behind bid for its biggest new opportunity since founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began putting ads on their search engine, one name kept coming up: Diane Greene. Little known outside Silicon Valley, Greene is a legend in tech circles and had been friendly with Page and Brin since their grad-school days at Stanford. She is married to Mendel Rosenblum, a well known computer science professor there. Greene, who is 61, speaks softly and her round face frequently lights up into a warm smile. But behind that mom-next-door demeanour is a sharper edge, which flashes in her eyes when the topic turns to competition. Like the Google guys, Greene brims with ambition, brings an engineer’s mindset and has the entrepreneurial bug. The same year Page and Brin took a leave of absence from Stanford to start Google, Greene, Rosenblum and three others teamed up to start VMware, which revolutionized how companies managed their data remotely using a technique called Virtualization. Greene served as its CEO for ten years, building a business valued at $49 billion at its peak and developing a reputation as a singular talent: A computer science whiz with impeccable executive abilities who understood the business of selling technology to the world’s biggest companies. In a potent validation of her industry status, Page recruited Greene to Google’s board of directors in 2012.