Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#81

Post by virtuallynathan » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

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?

Yes, WorkDocs is used extensively for document sharing. Chime is the go-to chat/meeting/VC app. People use WorkSpaces when they need a Windows or Linux test machine.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#82

Post by pmart123 » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 10:09 PM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #50

xchaotic wrote: post #14

Very anectodal, but some things are better on Azure, because they were late to the party, for example azure blob storage. It costs the same as s3, but it supports journaling, so you can do journal archives. You can run your main thing on aws and keep backups on azure. If you wanted backups with journaling on AWS, you'd have to use EFS at minimum, which is orders of magnitude more expensive.

Azure Blob Storage also supports immutable blobs (they can't be overwritten or deleted once written to), which is interesting for various compliance and auditing scenarios: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/azure-immutable-blob-...

Interesting. S3 does have object versioning, which I believe once enabled, causes the object versions to preserve always be preserved. I think the AWS equivalent though is using AWS Glacier and creating a vault lock.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#83

Post by pmart123 » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 10:13 PM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #42

theDoug wrote: post #32

Am I reading correctly that they're including LinkedIn as Cloud revenue?

They include all their SaaS offering in their Cloud revenue I believe.

I think Linkedin is classified in the Productivity and Business segment.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#84

Post by pmart123 » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

ironfootnz wrote: post #62

You can now scale excel in the cloud.

In seriousness, isn't this where Microsoft should have a competitive advantage? If Excel integrates with Azure easily, doesn't it incentive Azure adoption? I guess I'm picturing a bank analyst running a derivatives model that in the background, spins up 10 Azure server-less functions in parallel that hit a database hosted on Azure? The banker is now happy Excel "works quickly" but it really is just connects a front-end people are comfortable with alongside cloud resources?

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#85

Post by kurtisc » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

txcwpalpha wrote: post #29

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…

>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…

I don't think this is that fallacy. It's also fallacious to dismiss something as wrong if an argument in its favour uses a fallacy.

If something is described as 'cloud' but uses a definition most people don't recognise or describe as 'cloud', that's at least worth noting. It's arguably prescriptive linguistics.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#86

Post by 013a » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 10:55 PM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #26

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.

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…

I disagree, totally. Most companies who buy Office 365 want Active Directory just as much as the office products. Azure AD is an official Azure product; it's got Azure right in the name and lives on the Azure console. AD, hosted email inboxes, OneDrive storage; that's what companies are increasingly looking to O365 for. The Office suite is just a checkbox next to those things.

You can't punish Microsoft's categorization of these things just because Amazon doesn't have directly competing products. Well, actually they do; they have Workdocs and hosted AD. But no one uses them. Both of these are official AWS products; are you going to suggest we should start sharding out Amazon's product suite by revenue per product just to get a perfectly fair comparison of revenue?

G-Suite is categorized as a Google Cloud product. I guess we should just completely cut G-Suite out of GCloud's revenue total? Even though it does directory-like functionality and competes directly with Office, Outlook, etc?

Where do you draw the line? Ultimately, you draw the line at mechanism of delivery and payment, which is what Cloud has always been about. Office 365 and AzureAD are pay-per-seat, and thus by extension correlates with pay-as-you-go, just like any other cloud product.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#87

Post by znpy » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 11:00 PM UTC

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.

Well parts of AWS are cloud desktops, workmail etc... Those are counted on the AWS side. Why shouldn't their Microsoft equivalent be counted?

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#88

Post by h1d » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 11:00 PM UTC

Azure interface is such a crazy mess I don't know how prople live with it.

It's so MS with 50 menus with uninteresting options intertwined and error messages usually make no sense, just like Windows.

I've even chosen to use another provider for running Windows, even though running it on MS feels more safe.

I'll never want to work for a company with pure MS stack.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#89

Post by sithadmin » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 11:35 PM UTC

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.

Not to mention that Microsoft VARs have been doing things like offering discounts on Enterprise Agreement licensing that correspond 1:1 against pre-committed spend on Azure.

Re: Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

#90

Post by Aeolun » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 11:41 PM UTC

browsercoin wrote: post #58

lleims wrote: post #8

Ben Thompson of Stratechery precisely wrote about this last week: >Given this week’s theme, though, I wanted to focus on AWS: revenue was up 46%, and while that may be lower than Azure in percentage terms, it is almost certainly higher in absolute terms. AWS had $6.7 billion in revenue last quarter, while Microsoft’s entire Server Products and Cloud Services — the majority of which remains on-premises — was $5.7 bill…

wonder how much of those were attributed to Serverless revenues....probably negligible. 2018 is almost over and I still don't know if I should go fully serverless, more importantly, which cloud vendor has fixed the "cold startup time" for serverless functions. Google seems quite promising but still no recent study has been done on this. Would somebody like to see a test on this done? I've been wanting a straight up a…

It seems to me that any vendor could solve this for the price of around 24 requests a day...