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Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

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Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#61

Post by bepotts »

vl wrote: post #49
duskwuff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Do Amazon employees use these tools themselves?

I was an engineer at Amazon for a couple years (left about a year ago) and I've never heard of anybody using these services. It's possible that some of the services that we used internally were simply frontends for those AWS services. Having an internal frontend for an AWS service was common.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#63

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

In that scenario, the Microsoft numbers are even more mysterious as OneDrive for Business just another non-billable component of SharePoint that's consuming that storage, which AFAIK isn't Azure storage, but in dedicated Office 365 nodes. The Amazon Drive service AFAIK is just a frontend to S3.

The interesting thing about O365 is that it combines a very valuable licensing cash stream with a variety of services.

The story that Microsoft SEs used to sort of tell a few years back was that Microsoft needed so many spinning disks to support Exchange workload IOPS that they had ridiculous amounts of "free" storage available for low-IO workloads like SharePoint/OneDrive. No idea if that was true years ago or is true today.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#64

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

When someone is directly comparing Amazon and Microsoft "clouds", I absolutely assumed they meant Azure vs. AWS. To the exact generic definition I shouldn't have done that, but when it's specifically up against Amazon, well, things can be true but also misleading.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#65

Post by Mindless2112 »

Matthias247 wrote: post #56
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…

As a counterpoint: I purchased office 365 purely for Onedrive. I was totally happy with my ancient office products (2013?) before, but I wanted to get some cloud storage with good synchronization and sharing tools as well as a good web interface. The Onedrive/Office365 offering provided that. However it might be true that I'm the exception on this, and that most of the Office365 licenses are sold to corporations that…

I also subscribed only for OneDrive. I was happily using LibreOffice.

With Dropbox dropping support for ZFS on Linux, I had no reason not to switch. It's cheaper than Dropbox and you get Office.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#66

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

I would disagree, it's not a "no true Scotsman" argument.

Microsoft is actively competing against AWS IaaS and PaaS services, and leveraging embedded product features and license terms to force the issue with enterprise customers. Microsoft's spin is that those embedded relationships will compel customers to just join Azure. (Example: Windows 10 and Azure AD dramatically simplify PC management. How receptive is the market to that proposition? (I don't know, btw))

If they aren't getting heavy traction with their millions of existing enterprise customers adopting cloud services, they are doing something wrong that Amazon is doing right.

Additionally, the fact the Microsoft can sell Office and Exchange is a known, irrelevant fact -- they've been extracting a toll from every business since like 1995. What isn't clear is if they have the ability to compete toe to toe with AWS (the market leader in IaaS/PaaS).

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#67

Post by Scarbutt »

potato1234 wrote: post #41
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.

But if that's the case why not consider Google search under cloud reveneue and call it a day?

Because you don't pay a fee to use Google search.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#68

Post by basilgohar »

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.

This is, in fact, the first time I've heard of them, and we use AWS to host our production services!

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#70

Post by cududa »

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.

Don’t think Amazon is as much as a competitor here. However, Google Cloud does roll in all GApps revenue into their Cloud reporting
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