1. Offer a great user experience. Many cloud providers are just pumping products out the door with little to no concern for UX.
2. Have great personality. That could be through offering outstanding support, or through being the kind of company that people root for. (Honeycomb.io is a good example of this.)
Of the many people who hated Microsoft during their rise to power, one of the most coherent groups were people who were mad because MS put a competitor with an arguably better product out of business.
That is in fact how FUD got into the vernacular. They would make vague promises that you couldn't quite call outright lies about having a product coming in that market, and a year later they'd put out something tepid (thereby proving they were lying about their progress earlier), but with some bulk licensing deal.
By the time the MS product came out the competitor would already be experiencing reduced sales growth because people would play wait-and-see for the MS product.
There is nothing stopping any of these folks from pulling the same trick. Having a better product will not save you. A brilliant product might, but even that's not a given.
Who is gonna play wait-and-see in this day and age? We're not in the 90's where one had to wait for the product to be announced, then built, then shipped on a CD.
If a product has lots of integrations within your company, or if you store lots of data in it which would need to be migrated to another product (e.g. a database), or if lots of people in your company need to receive training for the product, then it might make sense to wait 6 months to see what product the big player is going to come out with, rather than choosing a smaller niche vendor.
UX doesn't usually factor into purchasing decisions at bigcorps anyway. It's usually a matrix with products on rows and desired features in columns. The chosen product is the one that ticks all the boxes. Engineers who bring actual domain knowledge into the discussion are ignored because more complex background information and criteria means more work and more discussions with the board.
Ah, I had glanced at their landing page before posting above and just saw the product. I didn't realize they were outspoken about things. This makes more sense to me now.
1. Offer a great user experience. Many cloud providers are just pumping products out the door with little to no concern for UX.
2. Have great personality. That could be through offering outstanding support, or through being the kind of company that people root for. (Honeycomb.io is a good example of this.)