Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 120 posts

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#31

Post by nkassis »

xchaotic wrote: post #14

Very anectodal, but some things are better on Azure, because they were late to the party, for example azure blob storage. It costs the same as s3, but it supports journaling, so you can do journal archives. You can run your main thing on aws and keep backups on azure. If you wanted backups with journaling on AWS, you'd have to use EFS at minimum, which is orders of magnitude more expensive.

And some things are very much worse. I feel like if you stick to MS technology feature you are probably going to be ok but my anecdotal evidence around other features built around open source tech has been not good.

For example AKS (azure kubernetes service) has been problematic for us. Similarly AWS RDS is much better than Azure PostgreSQL offering.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#33

Post by duskwuff »

awad wrote: post #17
code4tee wrote: post #5

These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like Office into “cloud revenue.” When talking about compute cloud they are still way behind Amazon although you don’t get that from the misleading headline.

On the flip side, I believe Amazon counts their Office and Drop/Box competitors under AWS as well so it may not be as apples to oranges as first perceived.

I suspect there are a lot fewer customers for Amazon WorkDocs / WorkMail / WorkSpaces than for Microsoft's equivalents, though. I've certainly never heard of anyone using them.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#34

Post by [deleted] »

duskwuff wrote: post #33
awad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, I believe Amazon counts their Office and Drop/Box competitors under AWS as well so it may not be as apples to oranges as first perceived.

I suspect there are a lot fewer customers for Amazon WorkDocs / WorkMail / WorkSpaces than for Microsoft's equivalents, though. I've certainly never heard of anyone using them.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#35

Post by jhowell »

code4tee wrote: post #5

These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like Office into “cloud revenue.” When talking about compute cloud they are still way behind Amazon although you don’t get that from the misleading headline.

But if we're talking about cloud computing and microsoft offers these these services in the cloud, they should not be penalized because their customers once started on the desktop. They're demonstrating that they are making the transition.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#36

Post by duskwuff »

cwyers wrote: post #12
code4tee wrote: post #5

These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like Office into “cloud revenue.” When talking about compute cloud they are still way behind Amazon although you don’t get that from the misleading headline.

This is nearly a "no true Scotsman" definition of cloud revenue, where if Amazon doesn't have a product in a market segment it shouldn't count. Google and Microsoft both have offerings in the cloud SaaS office suite market segment, and it's a real liability for Amazon that they do not.

Amazon does have a cloud SaaS office suite, actually -- Amazon WorkDocs / WorkMail / WorkSpaces. I've hardly ever heard of businesses using them, though; Office 365 and Google Apps have the market pretty well locked down.

I feel like there is a fundamental distinction to be made between infrastructure services (like AWS S3, EC2, RDB, etc) and end-user services (like Office 365). Combining the two doesn't make a lot of sense; procurement for the two typically happens separately, and businesses frequently mix-and-match vendors for infrastructure and end-user services.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#37

Post by cwyers »

tekno45 wrote: post #15
cwyers wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nearly a "no true Scotsman" definition of cloud revenue, where if Amazon doesn't have a product in a market segment it shouldn't count. Google and Microsoft both have offerings in the cloud SaaS office suite market segment, and it's a real liability for Amazon that they do not.

they do. https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

That's a slice of the stack. It's not a replacement for Word/Excel -- Google has Docs for that.

That said, I think that's evidence that this fits in the cloud revenue stream.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#38

Post by simonebrunozzi »

(disclaimer: I was at AWS from 2008 to 2014, and VMware from 2014 to 2016)

Microsoft have been playing this game for years now. It's a joke.

Anybody with just a little sense of how the industry works knows that AWS still leads the market with 80% to 90% penetration.

Microsoft should be punished for misleading the public this way. And some analysts should be fired for not knowing better.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#39

Post by duskwuff »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #29
dcolkitt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. When people buy Office 365, they're primarily purchasing a the MS Office product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery. That doesn't really make this cloud revenue. Imagine if MS was forced to "unbundle" Office 365. Consumers could purchase a license to run MS Office on any platform. On of which might be hosted Azure. What percent of the Office 365 revenue would accrue to the product…

>Not really. When people buy Office 365, they're primarily purchasing a the MS Office product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery. And when people buy Amazon RDS, they're primarily purchasing a database product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery. Imagine if Amazon was forced to "unbundle" Amazon RDS. Consumers could purchase a license to run the database on any platfor…

Amazon RDS is literally just a hosted offering of an off-the-shelf database server (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server). There isn't really anything there to "unbundle".

Amazon Aurora does appear to be a somewhat unique offering, but it appears to be tightly coupled to their infrastructure; I doubt that it could be unbundled without major rearchitecture.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#40

Post by duskwuff »

cwyers wrote: post #37
tekno45 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they do. https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

That's a slice of the stack. It's not a replacement for Word/Excel -- Google has Docs for that. That said, I think that's evidence that this fits in the cloud revenue stream.

A more relevant AWS service is WorkDocs: https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/
Post reply on HN