James Governor

I have known Simon Wistow a long time, and always enjoy hanging out with him. He’s a web application and performance OG, one of the co-founders of Fastly. The company runs a solid conference called Xcelerate in London every year – which feels kind of like an indie conference. I always meet engineers building cool things, and the content is technical, rather than marketing led. This is a video I recorded with Simon about the show this year.

I am old enough to remember when people questioned whether Google Cloud even had a future within Alphabet. Well now we have a pretty clear answer – yes. I originally began this post as a quick roundup of news from Google Next 2026, but given Google’s results dropped the following week, let’s look at them first. In the first quarter, Google Cloud revenue jumped 63%, year over year, to $20 billion, in the parlance of the day – absolutely crushing it. To the moon, etc.

During his Google Cloud Next 26 keynote CEO Thomas Kurian said: “We’re collaborating with Apple as their preferred cloud provider to develop the next generation of Apple Foundation Models based on Gemini technology. These models will now power future Apple Intelligence features including a more personalized Siri coming later this year.” This is a big deal. This news didn’t come from Apple, which is notoriously tight lipped about such things. There wasn’t a press release about it.