11 ms·

Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue

266 points by samaysharma 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
alexeldeib 8y ago
These numbers are so misleading. I understand why they are the numbers published, but AWS vs Azure last time I heard real numbers was approximately a 3:1 market share ratio. Including Office 365, Dynamics, etc doesn't make sense to me. We don't include Prime in Amazon Cloud, AFAIK.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  AWS includes their PaaS AWS service offerings in their revenue, no (Cognito, dev tools, Workspaces, etc)? Why wouldn't Microsoft include O365 and Dynamics then? Raw compute and storage isn't where the money is at long term, it's the lock in value add services (especially with Kubernetes and Hashicorp making multicloud and portability first class). Sidenote: I have seen A TON of open roles looking for Azure and GCP skills over AWS lately.
  - sun_n_surf 8y ago
    Open roles for Azure & GCP might remain open for longer because of lower supply and poorer matching, not because of higher positions being searched for. The AWS talent market probably clears more easily given that it has existed longer.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I don't disagree. I'd also argue it's because certain retail clients won't use AWS for obvious reasons like not funding your competitor (based on conversations I've had with retail clients).
- phillipcarter 8y ago
  Not sure what the article is counting, but at least in the Q1 earnings call[0] Office 365, Dynamics, etc. are separate: [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q1/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q1... (Disclaimer: I work for microsoft)
  - alexeldeib 8y ago
    I'm also an MS employee. Are you sure no Office service revenue is included? I assumed from the size of the gap they must be piling it in. If not, that leaves an even larger unaccounted-for gap between Azure and the claimed 24 billion. Under C+E, the last time they tipped the hand on cloud revenue it was ~18 billion with about a third from Azure AFAIK. To me, that is woefully misleading to compare us on 1:1 terms with AWS.
- runlevel1 8y ago
  AWS has WorkMail and WorkDocs, which is in the same space as Office 365. Amazon Connect sounds similar to Microsoft Dynamics, though I'm not really familiar with either. Amazon isn't currently a major player in that arena, but they are still competing under the Amazon banner.
  - nostrebored 8y ago
    They're completely separate products. Connect is call center facilitation software that can utilize lambda (and correspondingly a suite of other services) when routing and leverage AWS resources for metric collection and logging. It integrates with both your typical desk phone or a computer via WebRTC. Microsoft Dynamics is a CRM product. Completely different spheres.
- jonathansorum 8y ago
  How does it work with the Enterprise Agreements these days? A few years ago it was common to hear that customers got O365/Azure included in their EA (likely free), but weren't using it. Don't know how much truth there was to it, since I don't have first hand experience. Are EAs with bundled cloud still a thing? (Were they ever?)
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    If you are a core cal customer there is a bridge cal to link your subscriptions to the EA. They do not want you to carry office as perpetual software and will encourage you to negotiate away your ability to terminate O365 and get your licenses back, if you had that right. The push now that I hear about is subscription windows, pstn dialing/O365 E5 and azure commit.
code4tee 8y ago
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.
- cwyers 8y ago
  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.
  - tekno45 8y ago
    they do. https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - cwyers 8y ago
      That's a slice of the stack. It's not a replacement for Word/Excel -- Google has Docs for that. That said, I think that's evidence that this fits in the cloud revenue stream.
      - duskwuff 8y ago
        A more relevant AWS service is WorkDocs: https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/
  - dcolkitt 8y ago
    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 products division compared to the cloud division. Sincere guess: 90%+. Another hypothetical scenario. Imagine if Apple offered a deal on iPhones. Get an iPhone for free as long as you sign up for a grossly overpriced $1000 iCloud contract. All of a sudden Apple would have hundreds of billion in "cloud revenue". But no reasonable person would all of a sudden say that they're now the biggest cloud provider in the world.
lleims 8y ago
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 billion. Microsoft of course has other cloud revenue, including Office 365 and Dynamics 365; those are SaaS products though and generally don’t compete with AWS. https://stratechery.com/2018/ibm-red-hat-follow-up-microsofts-earnings-amazons-earnings/ https://stratechery.com/2018/ibm-red-hat-follow-up-microsoft...
- browsercoin 8y ago
  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 answer for a long time but hard to find a consensus, seems to be all over the place.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    > which cloud vendor has fixed the "cold startup time" for serverless functions. I'm interested in this problem area, so I would be interested in your definition of fixed.
    - browsercoin 8y ago
      no warm up period despite sporadic use.
      - jacques_chester 8y ago
        It will depend a lot on "sporadic". The dominant factor is where your workload sits in the warmth hierarchy. RAM and disk space are limited, so less-frequent workloads will eventually be evicted from worker nodes.
JeromeLon 8y ago
According to Gartner (https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3884500 https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3884500), the 2017 revenues were: Amazon: 12.2B Microsoft: 3.1B Assuming Amazon continues on the same 25% YoY trend, it would be 15B in 2018. Microsoft could beat that number by reaching a 400% growth rate. That would be pretty amazing. But it's not the case.
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  This is comparing totally different numbers than what is being compared in the OP. I'm not exactly sure what Gartner includes in its "IaaS" revenue figures, nor am I sure what Forbes is including in its "cloud" revenue figures, but even Amazon's official press release [1] (which is what the OP is comparing) gives completely different numbers for 2017 AWS revenues than Gartner. 1: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncom-announces-third-quarter-sales-29-566-billion https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
Upvoter33 8y ago
Microsoft trying to win the PR battle...
- Terretta 8y ago
  To be fair, the VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016, surely has no dog in this hunt. // The enemy of my enemy...
xchaotic 8y ago
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.
- nkassis 8y ago
  And some things are very much worse. I feel like if you stick to MS technology feature you are probably going to be ok but my anecdotal evidence around other features built around open source tech has been not good. For example AKS (azure kubernetes service) has been problematic for us. Similarly AWS RDS is much better than Azure PostgreSQL offering.
  - merb 8y ago
    what is problematic on aks?
    - nkassis 8y ago
      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 they did. We had been on AKS for a bit and it was no where close to ready for GA.
      - alpb 8y ago
        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.
- GordonS 8y ago
theDoug 8y ago
Am I reading correctly that they're including LinkedIn as Cloud revenue?
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  They include all their SaaS offering in their Cloud revenue I believe.
  - pmart123 8y ago
    I think Linkedin is classified in the Productivity and Business segment.
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
(disclaimer: I was at AWS from 2008 to 2014, and VMware from 2014 to 2016) Microsoft have been playing this game for years now. It's a joke. Anybody with just a little sense of how the industry works knows that AWS still leads the market with 80% to 90% penetration. Microsoft should be punished for misleading the public this way. And some analysts should be fired for not knowing better.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  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.
  - simonebrunozzi 8y ago
    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.
    - NicoJuicy 8y ago
      In Belgium, I see way more roles for Azure than for AWS. Perhaps some bias for both of us, speaking to industry experts aren't numbers
    - orf 8y ago
      You met customers from every geographic region, or just the USA?
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      Your anecdotes mean nothing, there are plenty of people gathering data and market share numbers out there. Also, you're on HackerNews and you honestly think you're the only person on here that has dealt with a lot of cloud customers and vendors? C'mon. Anyhow, data > anyone's anecdotes.
boulos 8y ago
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, they want to know about potential hyper-growth market opportunities for the company. For Microsoft, more than anyone else, Office isn't a high growth opportunity. There is some amount of revenue uplift from customers "upgrading" from Office on prem to Office 365 (like Adobe when they forced Creative Suite to be subscription) but I doubt there are going to be lots of net new customers just because Office is on a subscription model. By contrast, Cloud infrastructure is a large opportunity for Microsoft. For Google (and to some degree AWS), "productivity suites" is actually a reasonable growth market, particularly as market share often comes from Office. However, the raw productivity market is still "only" $XXB (it's predominantly $X/seat, and there are only so many employees in the world) while people talking about "cloud" usually are talking about the opportunity being "all money spent on IT". tl;dr: I watch the YoY "Azure growth was XX%" numbers and ignore the headline revenue.
- espeed 8y ago
  If Google Cloud included all Google services (such as Google Search) that run on it as "customers", that would change the numbers a bit.
tanilama 8y ago
Oh, that Forbes author once again...
ironfootnz 8y ago
You can now scale excel in the cloud.
- pmart123 8y ago
  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?
MrTonyD 8y ago
I work for a company that sells software which is often deployed in the cloud. I'd say the ratio is about 30 to 1, with AWS far ahead. I'm always surprised when somebody starts talking about Azure - they usually work for a company where some executive was talked into Azure by Microsoft.
- nunez 8y ago
  or companies that are already 100% Microsoft based
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
rent
h1d 8y ago
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.
bradhe 8y ago
Cloud revenue numbers are database benchmarks for 2018
leroman 8y ago
I came to the comments fully expecting first comment to show false advertising. This is what I come to expect from Microsoft, I just don't trust anything coming from their PR department. This can't be good for Microsoft.

266 points by samaysharma 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

These numbers are so misleading. I understand why they are the numbers published, but AWS vs Azure last time I heard real numbers was approximately a 3:1 market share ratio. Including Office 365, Dynamics, etc doesn't make sense to me. We don't include Prime in Amazon Cloud, AFAIK.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
AWS includes their PaaS AWS service offerings in their revenue, no (Cognito, dev tools, Workspaces, etc)? Why wouldn't Microsoft include O365 and Dynamics then? Raw compute and storage isn't where the money is at long term, it's the lock in value add services (especially with Kubernetes and Hashicorp making multicloud and portability first class). Sidenote: I have seen A TON of open roles looking for Azure and GCP skills over AWS lately.
- sun_n_surf 8y ago
  Open roles for Azure & GCP might remain open for longer because of lower supply and poorer matching, not because of higher positions being searched for. The AWS talent market probably clears more easily given that it has existed longer.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I don't disagree. I'd also argue it's because certain retail clients won't use AWS for obvious reasons like not funding your competitor (based on conversations I've had with retail clients).
phillipcarter 8y ago
Not sure what the article is counting, but at least in the Q1 earnings call[0] Office 365, Dynamics, etc. are separate: [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q1/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q1... (Disclaimer: I work for microsoft)
- alexeldeib 8y ago
  I'm also an MS employee. Are you sure no Office service revenue is included? I assumed from the size of the gap they must be piling it in. If not, that leaves an even larger unaccounted-for gap between Azure and the claimed 24 billion. Under C+E, the last time they tipped the hand on cloud revenue it was ~18 billion with about a third from Azure AFAIK. To me, that is woefully misleading to compare us on 1:1 terms with AWS.
runlevel1 8y ago
AWS has WorkMail and WorkDocs, which is in the same space as Office 365. Amazon Connect sounds similar to Microsoft Dynamics, though I'm not really familiar with either. Amazon isn't currently a major player in that arena, but they are still competing under the Amazon banner.
- nostrebored 8y ago
  They're completely separate products. Connect is call center facilitation software that can utilize lambda (and correspondingly a suite of other services) when routing and leverage AWS resources for metric collection and logging. It integrates with both your typical desk phone or a computer via WebRTC. Microsoft Dynamics is a CRM product. Completely different spheres.
jonathansorum 8y ago
How does it work with the Enterprise Agreements these days? A few years ago it was common to hear that customers got O365/Azure included in their EA (likely free), but weren't using it. Don't know how much truth there was to it, since I don't have first hand experience. Are EAs with bundled cloud still a thing? (Were they ever?)
- Spooky23 8y ago
  If you are a core cal customer there is a bridge cal to link your subscriptions to the EA. They do not want you to carry office as perpetual software and will encourage you to negotiate away your ability to terminate O365 and get your licenses back, if you had that right. The push now that I hear about is subscription windows, pstn dialing/O365 E5 and azure commit.

code4tee 8y ago

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.

cwyers 8y ago
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.
- tekno45 8y ago
  they do. https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - cwyers 8y ago
    That's a slice of the stack. It's not a replacement for Word/Excel -- Google has Docs for that. That said, I think that's evidence that this fits in the cloud revenue stream.
    - duskwuff 8y ago
      A more relevant AWS service is WorkDocs: https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/
- dcolkitt 8y ago
  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 products division compared to the cloud division. Sincere guess: 90%+. Another hypothetical scenario. Imagine if Apple offered a deal on iPhones. Get an iPhone for free as long as you sign up for a grossly overpriced $1000 iCloud contract. All of a sudden Apple would have hundreds of billion in "cloud revenue". But no reasonable person would all of a sudden say that they're now the biggest cloud provider in the world.

lleims 8y ago

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 billion. Microsoft of course has other cloud revenue, including Office 365 and Dynamics 365; those are SaaS products though and generally don’t compete with AWS. https://stratechery.com/2018/ibm-red-hat-follow-up-microsofts-earnings-amazons-earnings/ https://stratechery.com/2018/ibm-red-hat-follow-up-microsoft...

browsercoin 8y ago
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 answer for a long time but hard to find a consensus, seems to be all over the place.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  > which cloud vendor has fixed the "cold startup time" for serverless functions. I'm interested in this problem area, so I would be interested in your definition of fixed.
  - browsercoin 8y ago
    no warm up period despite sporadic use.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      It will depend a lot on "sporadic". The dominant factor is where your workload sits in the warmth hierarchy. RAM and disk space are limited, so less-frequent workloads will eventually be evicted from worker nodes.

JeromeLon 8y ago

According to Gartner (https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3884500 https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3884500), the 2017 revenues were: Amazon: 12.2B Microsoft: 3.1B Assuming Amazon continues on the same 25% YoY trend, it would be 15B in 2018. Microsoft could beat that number by reaching a 400% growth rate. That would be pretty amazing. But it's not the case.

txcwpalpha 8y ago
This is comparing totally different numbers than what is being compared in the OP. I'm not exactly sure what Gartner includes in its "IaaS" revenue figures, nor am I sure what Forbes is including in its "cloud" revenue figures, but even Amazon's official press release [1] (which is what the OP is comparing) gives completely different numbers for 2017 AWS revenues than Gartner. 1: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncom-announces-third-quarter-sales-29-566-billion https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...

Upvoter33 8y ago

Microsoft trying to win the PR battle...

Terretta 8y ago
To be fair, the VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016, surely has no dog in this hunt. // The enemy of my enemy...

xchaotic 8y ago

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.

nkassis 8y ago
And some things are very much worse. I feel like if you stick to MS technology feature you are probably going to be ok but my anecdotal evidence around other features built around open source tech has been not good. For example AKS (azure kubernetes service) has been problematic for us. Similarly AWS RDS is much better than Azure PostgreSQL offering.
- merb 8y ago
  what is problematic on aks?
  - nkassis 8y ago
    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 they did. We had been on AKS for a bit and it was no where close to ready for GA.
    - alpb 8y ago
      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.
GordonS 8y ago

theDoug 8y ago

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

whoisjuan 8y ago
They include all their SaaS offering in their Cloud revenue I believe.
- pmart123 8y ago
  I think Linkedin is classified in the Productivity and Business segment.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

(disclaimer: I was at AWS from 2008 to 2014, and VMware from 2014 to 2016) Microsoft have been playing this game for years now. It's a joke. Anybody with just a little sense of how the industry works knows that AWS still leads the market with 80% to 90% penetration. Microsoft should be punished for misleading the public this way. And some analysts should be fired for not knowing better.

partiallypro 8y ago
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.
- simonebrunozzi 8y ago
  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.
  - NicoJuicy 8y ago
    In Belgium, I see way more roles for Azure than for AWS. Perhaps some bias for both of us, speaking to industry experts aren't numbers
  - orf 8y ago
    You met customers from every geographic region, or just the USA?
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    Your anecdotes mean nothing, there are plenty of people gathering data and market share numbers out there. Also, you're on HackerNews and you honestly think you're the only person on here that has dealt with a lot of cloud customers and vendors? C'mon. Anyhow, data > anyone's anecdotes.

boulos 8y ago

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, they want to know about potential hyper-growth market opportunities for the company. For Microsoft, more than anyone else, Office isn't a high growth opportunity. There is some amount of revenue uplift from customers "upgrading" from Office on prem to Office 365 (like Adobe when they forced Creative Suite to be subscription) but I doubt there are going to be lots of net new customers just because Office is on a subscription model. By contrast, Cloud infrastructure is a large opportunity for Microsoft. For Google (and to some degree AWS), "productivity suites" is actually a reasonable growth market, particularly as market share often comes from Office. However, the raw productivity market is still "only" $XXB (it's predominantly $X/seat, and there are only so many employees in the world) while people talking about "cloud" usually are talking about the opportunity being "all money spent on IT". tl;dr: I watch the YoY "Azure growth was XX%" numbers and ignore the headline revenue.

espeed 8y ago
If Google Cloud included all Google services (such as Google Search) that run on it as "customers", that would change the numbers a bit.

tanilama 8y ago

Oh, that Forbes author once again...

ironfootnz 8y ago

You can now scale excel in the cloud.

pmart123 8y ago
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?

MrTonyD 8y ago

I work for a company that sells software which is often deployed in the cloud. I'd say the ratio is about 30 to 1, with AWS far ahead. I'm always surprised when somebody starts talking about Azure - they usually work for a company where some executive was talked into Azure by Microsoft.

nunez 8y ago
or companies that are already 100% Microsoft based

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

rent

h1d 8y ago

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.

bradhe 8y ago

Cloud revenue numbers are database benchmarks for 2018

leroman 8y ago

I came to the comments fully expecting first comment to show false advertising. This is what I come to expect from Microsoft, I just don't trust anything coming from their PR department. This can't be good for Microsoft.