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Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

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Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#191

These results are misleading for the same reasons why Microsoft’s market share claims are misleading. Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” If you look at people truly using their cloud products in terms of things that pair off against AWS offerings the picture looks vastly different. I’ve worked with many companies recently that are broadly “all in” on AWS but still use O365 and AD as core…

they're competing in different-but-overlapping markets. marketing spin can say whatever story you want on both sides as it's competitive.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#192
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren’t cheap, but they listen to us when we need something Yet amazingly their interfaces and quality is incredibly horrible. Azure like most other things Microsoft makes feels like a half baked and over fitted platform with serious quality issues.

I don’t really like the admin interfaces or CLIs of either AWS or Azure. I’ve had an easier time with Azure than AWS for my personal projects, but maybe that’s just from being used to the Microsoft way. I’m not sure why they are so much harder to use than the smaller services like heroku or digital ocean. You’d think the big guys would have the best and easiest services, but they sure don’t.

DigitalOcean has some of the best APIs, documentation, and support I've ever encountered. I wish more companies were like them.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who used to firmly agree with this position, but in the last year my mind has been changed without reservation. The time where this was a good idea has genuinely passed. There is no earthly way that any reasonable organization will be able to provide even the security that is present by relying on a large-scale cloud provider. There is no way they will come out on top money-wise either. The big…

This varies by case - Office365 phishing breakins have been a bad epidemic for a long time now and the anti-phishing measures have not kept up well enough. I think MS still doesn't support any phishing resistant 2FA method there...

FIDO is supported, which is cred phishing resistant - but Oauth permissions phishing obviously can't be prevented if it's all 'legitimate' traffic to a bad app.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#194
post #69
post #7

I work for a Danish municipality with roughly 10,000 employees. I’m not sure if you know, but our public sector has been competing with Estonia at being the most digitised in the world for a decade. We operate an estimated 300-500 different IT-systems, some of them enterprise sized SAP solutions deployed on old IBM mainframes with multiple layers of APIs to make their fronts somewhat web-based (don’t ask). Others are…

Errm. "Estimated" 300-500 systems? I worked at a corporate with (at one point) 1891 systems; we had several ways of counting them... Some ways said 44 ( business platforms) But count them we could! If I was your CIO counting would be my number one mission!

Perhaps they are part of one team in a larger org, perhaps the org has terrible asset management, perhaps "systems" means "applications" that can be counted different ways and this post wasn't a report to the CIO.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#195

I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. MS has a long history of being a provider…

You're mistaken if you think Microsoft doesn't compete directly with its partners. If anything, they are very sneaky how they do it, every ISV knows and yet still collaborates with them. SharePoint improvements have been built and incorporated out of the box because/thanks to ISV's, Flow (now PowerAutomate) is a direct inspiration and competition from one of MS historical partners in the SharePoint space called Ninte…

This is so true. I've sat at tables in Redmond where they've managed to get their competition to take turns explaining what is and is not working for their products.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#197

I'm a retired programmer and now Uber driver in Silicon Valley so I often talk shop with my riders. I was giving a guy a ride to make a pitch for his product to a Japanese company. He related that his biggest challenge so far was when Walmart licensed his product and they insisted it absolutely could not be hosted on AWS so he had to transfer over to Azure. Obviously Amazon and Walmart are competitors and that might…

Work for a company that provides software for Walmart among many others, AWS was a no go from day 1. It was between GCP & Azure and Google has a way of not listening to customers so that experiment ended quickly and we're on Azure now.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#198

I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. MS has a long history of being a provider…

> The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make…

There is some tin foil to it, but I think it isn't even what you quoted.

It's that Amazon competes in many markets, and paying millions and millions to AWS is a benefit to Amazon, period.

Why fund a competitor when you could fund not-competitor?

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#199

I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. MS has a long history of being a provider…

> The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make…

When Amazon started expanding in retail beyond books, they signed supplier agreements to source inventory, the same way department stores have for decades.

Then Amazon used the retail sales information they gathered from these relationships to structure their Marketplace and Fulfilled by Amazon products, breaking the exclusivity clauses in their existing supplier agreements. Amazon lost lawsuits over this.

Kinda hard to call it a conspiracy theory when Amazon is upfront and out loud about their intention to use customer data to enter new markets whenever they see fit.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#200
post #57
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, Enterprise deals are more based on sales skills than technology. Companies like Microsoft tend to have multiple ongoing points of contact with their Enterprise customers such as account managers, technical account managers, professional services consultants etc. These points of contact are (hopefully) doing whatever it is the customer wants them to but are also feeding back intel to their (Microsoft's)…

What is wrong with all that? That they implement what the customer wants?

Nothing... I was just making the point that Microsoft has a number of people on the inside at Enterprise customers (which Amazon typically won't have) who help their sales team. This, rather than technical or service offering differences, is likely a significant factor as to why they appear to be more successful at winning contracts against Amazon.

The 'unfortunately' part of my comment was only referring to the fact that technical differences often don't play a significant factor in these deals.

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