This is a pretty broad generalization. Not to mention, just because Google has better advertising and promotion of its new ideas and research, I'd not discount Apple, IBM or Microsoft. If anyone, IBM has consecutively stood the test of time with new innovations and inventions. World changing.
It's talking about the auto-generated root password that gets emailed to you upon creation of your VM initially. Most everyone would, hopefully, have changed his/her root password manually, upon receiving it in email via cleartext.
I'm getting conflicting reports about the passwords. Were these plaintext passwords ONLY the autogenerated ones, or are there other passwords that have been compromised as well. Also, has anyone been able to get a list of everything that was displayed on the page?
Only to find out at the end, it's all been real and the people with the tin foil hats aren't really that far off base.