The battle among the cloud's "megaplatform" players – global providers of IaaS/PaaS platforms – just got much more competitive. At the Google Cloud NEXT 2018 event last week, the company rolled out an ambitious hybrid strategy, stepped up its campaign to accelerate AI adoption and ratcheted up its partner programs and ecosystem. Google is starting to look a lot less like an aspiring "up and comer" than a full-on threat to #1 and #2 players, AWS and Microsoft.