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Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

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Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#71

Post by iamleppert »

bostonpete wrote: post #53
iamleppert wrote: post #47

Love this quote: “The biggest advantage I have with Microsoft is I don’t have to go to any other vendor for any solution -- I can go to one partner for all of my operating systems, all of my development environment and all of my infrastructure tools,” he said. “Why would I waste time looking at another third-party solution?” ... "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". "I'm a lazy C-level exec." "I love having all my…

I see your points but I think your characterization of this attitude as lazy or stupid are overly hostile. I'm not going to defend the mindset but I can see some appeal in having one company to deal with. Anyone who's ever faced a problem where multiple vendors are blaming each other for your ongoing woes knows how frustrating that can be.

And that's what a CIO/CTO's job is. Be technically competent to understand the technology he is using, or (at least) have someone on his team that is. It isn't rocket science to figure out where the problem is (be it CPU, network I/O, some software run wild), etc. If you're involved in IT, especially if you're developing software, you should be able to do some rudimentary analysis of the software you're actually buying.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#72

Post by philip1209 »

Can Microsoft's internal Azure expenses be accounted for in sales? Specifically, if Office365 used $100 million worth of Azure services in their budget, does that count toward overall Azure sales? Does part of the marketing budget go toward giving out free Azure trials? Then, the question I ask is what percentage of Azure sales come from 3rd parties.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#73

Post by MichaelGG »

avenger123 wrote: post #39
jf22 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an MS dev with a little Django, Rails and PHP experience and I'm always sort of overwhelmed with the choices I have non-ms environments. Recently I wanted to get a simple laptop for Python development and I don't know how to begin selecting the right tools for the job. I see myself having to make all sorts of evaluations I'm just too inexperienced to make. Which OS? Whats PyPy good for? Is it supported on Ubuntu?…

You know, to some extent, this is a direct result of working with Microsoft tools. I am generalizing but Microsoft developers get to used to getting mostly nice and tidy answers to everything (regardless if its good). With open-source, my gosh, you actually have to do some analysis and make a sound judgement without having the Microsoft mothership tell you whether its good or bad. I don't dispute that the choices can…

There's a lot of development and apps that simply are not going to have any real difference based on their choice of ORM or even DB. Having it all-in-one has a lot of benefits.

Also, it's unfair to say open source isn't the same. How many PHP projects fairly evaluated anything but MySQL or PHP's built-in MySQL data access libs? And why would you? If you aren't at the point where you need to evaluate, your app will probably work fine on MySQL anyways. Also, Ruby-on-Rails provides quite a bit of defaults...

Microsoft might provide more kinds of libraries, but that's only because of their size. If Zend created an MVC system and built it into PHP, what kind of uptake would that see?

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#75

Post by vyrotek »

blantonl wrote: post #43

Who here on HN is running any portion of their startup or established Internet business on Azure?

I've worked with/for 3 companies all built completely on Azure. I was hired by 2 of the 3 companies to help them switch to Azure. The third is my own startup which has been on Azure since Microsoft launched it.

It really is a fantastic platform.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#76

Post by josh2600 »

barista wrote: post #68
niggler wrote: post #4

How are the free hours from BizSpark handled? ( http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0012p ) Are those treated as sales?

Even if they did, they probably don't add to the 1B figure as they are free

I don't want to describe this comment as ignorant but I almost feel that I have to...

There are numerous accounting tricks employed by organizations big and small to book revenue on promotional services.

One popular way of doing this is to charge the marketing departments budget for the promo hours but record the cost of the hours as revenue. The overall bottom line of $MSFT is uneffected but the product, in this case azure, benefits from increased visibility.

I don't think Azure is doing anywhere near AWS in sales if you don't count promo deals.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#77

Post by jaynate »

tytso wrote: post #41

Comparing against Amazon's total cloud sales may be comparing apples and orange. To quote from the article: "Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview." What software is included "to create related Windows cloud services", and is that the only use for said softare? i.e., are they including things…

I wonder if the $1B number doesn't also include internal marketing "funny money" microsoft is using to seed the business. There are companies who have been given large stipends of free services to wet their appetite for the platform.

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#79

Post by jaynate »

josh2600 wrote: post #76
barista wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they did, they probably don't add to the 1B figure as they are free

I don't want to describe this comment as ignorant but I almost feel that I have to... There are numerous accounting tricks employed by organizations big and small to book revenue on promotional services. One popular way of doing this is to charge the marketing departments budget for the promo hours but record the cost of the hours as revenue. The overall bottom line of $MSFT is uneffected but the product, in this cas…

Completely agree with this. They are giving away massive amounts of platform time to seed usage. Better question is when Azure will break even (net, including R&D and internal marketing transfers to the Azure business).

Re: Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

#80

Post by megaman821 »

tytso wrote: post #41

Comparing against Amazon's total cloud sales may be comparing apples and orange. To quote from the article: "Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview." What software is included "to create related Windows cloud services", and is that the only use for said softare? i.e., are they including things…

Most likely the software sales are Windows Server licenses and the Azure tools needed to make a private cloud. A lot of companies have policies that prevent them from using public cloud servers.
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