191–200 of 221 posts
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Kind of telling how the chart has Oracle, Adobe and Intel as "peers" but AWS is nowhere to be seen. I didn't even know Intel or Adobe had cloud offerings.
> I didn't even know Intel or Adobe had cloud offerings. Google includes their SaaS offerings as part of Google Cloud (like Gmail and Docs). Intel and Adobe have SaaS offerings. They're comparing Gmail to hosted Photoshop basically.
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The ad business is almost completely margin, almost any other business is going to be lower margin.
Yep, it reminds me of Dutch Disease [1] in economics where countries that happen upon an enormously profitable natural resource see a decline or an inability to compete internationally in other sectors of their economy. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
Of course little else is going to look like a better idea! Every direction is downhill!
But every other local maximum can only be reached by first crossing a valley.
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Because we have 100 years of free market capitalist based economic history that it would be unwise to ignore?
Enterprise computing was already pretty mature in the pre-cloud era yet prices were (and still are) very high. So when exactly does this commoditization kick in? 50 years? 100?
I was working at Google when AWS launched in 2006. The internal message was, we don't want to build a competitor. We have the technology to compete in this area, but it is fundamentally a low-margin business, whereas reinvesting in our core business is high-margin, so we should keep our infrastructure to ourselves. I wouldn't say the Google strategy was wrong per se - their stock has about 10x'd since then. But it's…
If we're using stock price as a metric to judge strategy, GOOG's gains have been stomped by AMZN since 2006 by about 8x: https://yhoo.it/30KNk3A By that chart, GOOG's only about 5x-ed since 2006.
If they would have invested in on-demand streaming video, maybe they wouldn't have been "stomped" by Netflix's 60x return since a similar date?
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Obviously I have zero information about how they came to that conclusion, but it sounds to me like they looked too far into the future. With basically every major tech company (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM) now having some cloud offering and so many companies switching their on-site infrastructure for the cloud, it seems like it's only a matter of time until compute time becomes a commodity. Once that happens prici…
Why does this argument get made so much? Why is it assumed that the market will behave this way?
Not sure if this is the original from HBR but it is from 1965: https://hbr.org/1965/11/exploit-the-product-life-cycle
From "Maturity Stage":
> The market maturity stage typically calls for a new kind of emphasis on competing more effectively. The originator is increasingly forced to appeal to the consumer on the basis of price, marginal product differences, or both.
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Goldman Sachs = the big banks IIRC Goldman valued WeWork at $60B
Goldman valued WeWork at $60B, as part of their sales pitch to lead the IPO . The context makes all the difference since the point of that valuation was to aid a sales pitch, not be an accurate assessment.
The key distinction with pitching to lead to the IPO is they sought to find investors (as opposed to wework management) at this price too, but not enough people bit to fill the raise.
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When we say "undervalued", you mean compared to competitors? When the tech bubble bursts, either everyone gets bailed out, and it does become worth 200B. Or we are going to find out much of this tech money was speculation. What's hard about running a server farm? Does it lend to this valuation?
I'm not sure what "speculation" is meant to imply here. Deutsche is explicitly giving a speculative valuation here; they speculate that Google Cloud will reach $38 billion of revenue in 2025. But that's not some pie-in-the-sky impossible dream; AWS brought $25B (and operating income of $7B) last year. There are two direct responses to your last question: all parts of running a server farm are hard, and a cloud platfo…
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It's DB, if they knew what they were talking about then maybe they could have predicted their own share price sliding 97% in a decade.
If a company fails, does that mean everyone in the company is wrong about their work?
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How is it in Microsoft's DNA? They've always run the software, not the hardware. And for Azure, they just took all their Office customers and rebranded them as "Azure" customers, pumping their cloud numbers.
Enterprise Sales, Support, Training, Certifications, Deals for packing services/software/etc, Incentive programs, Extensive partner network, etc, etc, etc. There's an entire realm of software development and consulting in and around Microsoft enterprise products - and that has extended to Azure as well. Personally, I've worked with AWS,GCP and Azure in a professional capacity (data science consulting) - and while Azu…
It's a rich set of articles about various system design patterns. It's not even really set in the context of Azure, it's just plain "Here are things you should learn about". It's really well done.
I haven't seen anything close from Google or Amazon.
Let me get this straight. Wasn't Waymo valued at $210Bn like 5 months ago? Cloud is $225Bn. Google has $117Bn in cash. It's total market cap is $839Bn. That means the rest of Google is worth $287Bn. Really?