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Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

forbes.com

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Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#111

Post by Yeroc »

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.

I'm not so sure.

In the world of large enterprise which is just now waking up and jumping all-in with "digital transformation" projects and "cloud strategies" Microsoft appears to be winning the battle. I work for a company that services large enterprises and anecdotally I'm seeing the majority of them choosing Azure over AWS. I believe this is in large part because Microsoft knows how to sell to enterprises, they have great tie-ins with existing on-prem core infrastructure like Active Directory which is a big deal to large companies. When large enterprises start jumping on board they will move the needle pretty significantly as they ramp-up. I anticipate Azure closing the gap on AWS pretty significantly over the next 2 years.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#112

Post by sjellis »

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.

Office is one of Microsoft's most lucrative lines, whilst I doubt that most AWS users pay much attention to WorkMail/WorkDocs. Many big companies play games with reporting numbers, and this is just a rather transparent example. Unfortunately, the fact that it got the Forbes story rewards that this kind of trick.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#114

Post by amf12 »

addicted wrote: post #43
txcwpalpha wrote: post #29

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. 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…

But there are unbundled DBs that people run. PostgreSQL, mongo, MySQL and the majority of those are run on the AWS cloud. There is clearly a distinction here. For example, I don’t know if the word Azure is even mentioned when I go to buy an O365 license.

> But there are unbundled DBs that people run. PostgreSQL, mongo, MySQL

And people can still buy standalone Office installations.

> For example, I don’t know if the word Azure is even mentioned when I go to buy an O365 license.

How does this matter? Microsoft includes this as Cloud revenue and not Azure revenue.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#115

Post by amf12 »

owaislone wrote: post #98
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.

I think there is another perspective here. Consumer vs Developers. When we speak of the ongoing cloud vendor wars between AWS, Google, Azure and the likes of Digital Ocean, we mean cloud platforms for others to build and host things on, not consumer apps delivered through the cloud. If that was the case, we would have to count something like Dropbox or Google Photos as well, right? To me cloud provider in this contex…

> To me cloud provider in this context means a vendor that provides cloud platform for others to develop on top of. RDS counts, Office doesn't.

I completely agree with you on this one.

However all the cloud providers include their SaaS subscription services revenue in cloud revenue. So when comparing market, revenue and stocks, that's what we should compare them on. But here we are in this thread looking at their "cloud revenue" to figure out which is a bigger "cloud vendor". That's like comparing Apples and Oranges.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#116

Post by amf12 »

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.

The numbers are NOT misleading precisely because they compare the cloud revenue. Google includes GSuite revenue in their cloud revenue. So does Amazon which includes Work Docs.

Using their "cloud" revenue to figure out which is a bigger "cloud vendor" is a fallacy.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#117

Post by amf12 »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #75
partiallypro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you exclude Office 365, etc there your statement that AWS has 80-90% penetration is absolutely false. AWS has about ~45% of the market, Azure, GCS, IBM and Rackspace round out the top 5. Amazon & Google also both include their Office Suites in their Cloud numbers...so, it's not "a joke." Everyone does it. No one denies that for compute AWS is #1, right now.

You are blatantly wrong. Man, I've been in this industry for a long time, and I met literally thousands of cloud computing customers, from startups to large corporations. The current state of affairs is that AWS still dominates. Your claim of 45% shows that you are simply repeating what some myopic analyst has written. Talk to industry experts, and you'll see why I'm right.

> The current state of affairs is that AWS still dominates.

Nobody is saying otherwise.

> Your claim of 45% shows that you are simply repeating what some myopic analyst has written. Talk to industry experts, and you'll see why I'm right.

This is anecdotal. Provide some verifiable source.

Does AWS not report their WorkDocs (which nobody uses, and hence less revenue) and similar revenue in their AWS revenue? Does GCP not include G-Suite revenue in their Cloud revenue? I don't see what 'game' is Microsoft playing? Are they saying they are the #1 cloud provider because of their revenue? No.

This report is not a dick measuring contest to find the best and the biggest cloud provider. This is for Microsoft to showcase to investors why they should invest in Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#118

Post by crunchlibrarian »

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.

Yeah cloud and ML numbers are becoming a running joke in financial circles, at this point I'm pretty sure Oracle counts JRE downloads as cloud revenue somehow.

I wish these large corporations didn't demand so much creativity from their accountants to bluster an image.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#119

Post by alpb »

nkassis wrote: post #108
merb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is problematic on aks?

We've had nodes die (more than what we've experienced with simple vms). We've had cluster go into failed state multiple times and require full rebuild. We've had nodes simply stop responding but aks claims they are fine. It's been relatively unstable and we've had to work with support multiple in the past year because of issues. It has improved but it was pretty awful when they announced GA. We were surprised when th…

I worked at Azure in the past and this sounds like many Azure products. Azure takes a lot of time post-GA to actually stabilize a product.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#120

Post by espeed »

boulos wrote: post #47

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. There are arguments on both sides about "Should Office count as Cloud revenue?". We have the same decision regarding GSuite. If you take the "Cloud is anything a business depends on" argument, then it obviously should count (but then all sorts of things like SaaS would count). I like to think of this from an investor's standpoint: what do they really want to know? In my estimation,…

If Google Cloud included all Google services (such as Google Search) that run on it as "customers", that would change the numbers a bit.
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