Not speaking in an official capacity, but the analogy I've seen used is that big companies don't want to relive the RDBMS vendor lock-in experience.
I'm speaking about something other than k8s (Cloud Foundry), but the industry mood is the same. Folk want portability amongst IaaSes. Google are an underdog in that market, so it behooves them to support that effort -- to the point that there are Google teams helping with Cloud Foundry on GCP.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we donate the majority of engineering to Cloud Foundry.
I'm speaking about something other than k8s (Cloud Foundry), but the industry mood is the same. Folk want portability amongst IaaSes. Google are an underdog in that market, so it behooves them to support that effort -- to the point that there are Google teams helping with Cloud Foundry on GCP.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we donate the majority of engineering to Cloud Foundry.