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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 A
by 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 agoThis 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 agothey do. https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cwyers 8y agoThat'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 agoA more relevant AWS service is WorkDocs: https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/
- dcolkitt 8y agoNot 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.
- txcwpalpha 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. 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 platform. On of which might be hosted AWS. What percent of the Amazon RDS revenue would accrue to the products division compared to the cloud division... -- Yes, this is the literal definition of a "no true scotsman" fallacy.
- duskwuff 8y agoAmazon RDS is literally just a hosted offering of an off-the-shelf database server (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server). There isn't really anything there to "unbundle". Amazon Aurora does appear to be a somewhat unique offering, but it appears to be tightly coupled to their infrastructure; I doubt that it could be unbundled without major rearchitecture.
- addicted 8y agoBut there are unbundled DBs that people run. PostgreSQL, mongo, MySQL and the majority of those are run on the AWS cloud. There is clearly a distinction here. For example, I don’t know if the word Azure is even mentioned when I go to buy an O365 license.
- amf12 8y ago> But there are unbundled DBs that people run. PostgreSQL, mongo, MySQL And people can still buy standalone Office installations. > For example, I don’t know if the word Azure is even mentioned when I go to buy an O365 license. How does this matter? Microsoft includes this as Cloud revenue and not Azure revenue.
- kurtisc 8y agoI 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.
- duskwuff 8y agoAmazon 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 of sense; procurement for the two typically happens separately, and businesses frequently mix-and-match vendors for infrastructure and end-user services.
- vl 8y agoDo Amazon employees use these tools themselves?
- bepotts 8y agoI 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.
- virtuallynathan 8y agoYes, 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.
- potato1234 8y agoBut if that's the case why not consider Google search under cloud reveneue and call it a day?
- milesward 8y agoexactamundo
- Scarbutt 8y agoBecause you don't pay a fee to use Google search.
- potato1234 8y agoAdvertisers definitely pay.
- briffle 8y agoI'm not really sure how my copy of Excel and Word running on my work laptop (and subscribed to monthly) should qualify as "cloud revenue".. We do host our email on their cloud servers, but according to their own sales team, that is worth $5/month per subscriber for email only. Yet we pay $20/month per user for the full office suite installed on their systems. (and more for people with other tools like Microsoft Visio and Project) Its not a "no true scotsman" its that many of their products have no cloud component at all.
- cwyers 8y agoThe copy of Word and Excel on your laptop have cloud integration. You can do collaborative document editing a la Google Docs through the desktop copies or the web app versions.
- metafizikal 8y agoMicrosoft gloms together the pay-per-use/subscription part that totally doesn't need "the cloud" (Office apps) along with the other bits that do (email, Skype/Teams, OneDrive, etc.). It makes sense that they do from a financial reporting perspective, because they sell them and you buy them as one thing. How exactly should they split out the email or OneDrive component from Word or Excel of your $10-20/month? I don't think there's really a sensible way to do it without overcomplicating things.
- jsight 8y agoIts not so much "no true Scotsman" as, "what is a cloud and what is useful to track?". For comparing infrastructure offerings, it would be really misleading to include things like Amazon Music or MS Office (both of which are cloud offerings).
- Dylan16807 8y agoWhen 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.
- Spooky23 8y agoI 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).
- hcg 8y agoDisagree, it's just not an apples to apples comparison when you add in revenue from a largely unrelated SAAS offering.
- mr_toad 8y agoOn premis SQL server is clearly not cloud. Frankly, Microsoft are coming off desperate.
- owaislone 8y agoI think there is another perspective here. Consumer vs Developers. When we speak of the ongoing cloud vendor wars between AWS, Google, Azure and the likes of Digital Ocean, we mean cloud platforms for others to build and host things on, not consumer apps delivered through the cloud. If that was the case, we would have to count something like Dropbox or Google Photos as well, right? To me cloud provider in this context means a vendor that provides cloud platform for others to develop on top of. RDS counts, Office doesn't. That's how I look at it and I'm sure that's how MS looks at it. Certainly they wouldn't be blinded by Office revenue and think Azure is close to beating AWS. Office competes with Google Work Suite which isn't even part of GCP (even though it's linked).
- amf12 8y ago> To me cloud provider in this context means a vendor that provides cloud platform for others to develop on top of. RDS counts, Office doesn't. I completely agree with you on this one. However all the cloud providers include their SaaS subscription services revenue in cloud revenue. So when comparing market, revenue and stocks, that's what we should compare them on. But here we are in this thread looking at their "cloud revenue" to figure out which is a bigger "cloud vendor". That's like comparing Apples and Oranges.
- richdougherty 8y agoThe article discusses "cloud revenue" of $26.7b but the more relevant Azure revenue is less than a third of that. "Microsoft hasn’t disclosed how much revenue Azure brings in, but the Evercore analysts estimated that it generated more $7.74 billion in the 2018 fiscal year." From: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/microsoft-earnings-q1-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/microsoft-earnings-q1-2019.h...
- Spooky23 8y agoEven then, Azure services are consumed in the context of Office 365. (Azure AD)
- awad 8y agoOn 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.
- fermienrico 8y agoI think Dropbox uses their own infrastructure.
- swampthinker 8y agoHe means Amazon lists Dropbox storage as a competitor to AWS storage services.
- jkchu 8y agoI think GP comment actually meant that AWS has their own products that compete with similar products like Drop/Box and Office and they include revenue from those products as part of their AWS revenue.
- awad 8y agoYes, that's what I meant. Haven't figured out a clever way to say Dropbox + Box, Drop/Box seems OK. I'm also led to believe they compete with email as well.
- duskwuff 8y agoI 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- basilgohar 8y agoThis is, in fact, the first time I've heard of them, and we use AWS to host our production services!
- sleepybrett 8y agoGiven that Azure's market share is so much smaller than AWS wouldn't this just be "Azure has higher markups that AWS"
- partiallypro 8y agoIn many instances Azure is actually cheaper than AWS. Their egress is a lot cheaper than AWS for instance.
- jimnotgym 8y agoBut they have transitioned office to a Saas model to do this. I used to buy office every 5 years, now I pay per month. It is also so much more than just the office apps, there is Onedrive and Sharepoint and email too. I would say that Microsoft have done a pretty good job of making it's products cloud based.
- kerneltime 8y agoWonder if AWS reports the revenue from running retail on top of AWS? Retail does need to pay for AWS services..
- nkassis 8y agoThey might but I don't think the retail infrastructure is big enough to compare to say the office 365 use. I may be wrong but I just don't think it's costing them billions in AWS infrastructure to run.
- sharemywin 8y agoOr you could look at it like Amazon is way behind Microsoft in Saas.
- jhowell 8y agoBut if we're talking about cloud computing and microsoft offers these these services in the cloud, they should not be penalized because their customers once started on the desktop. They're demonstrating that they are making the transition.
- tootie 8y agoDoes Google include G Suite in their cloud umbrella? Microsoft does a really good job of using products like O365 or other IT kinda services as a lead-in to Azure infrastructure. Which is ironic because O365 kinda sucks.
- cududa 8y agoThey do. On O365 I’ve said the same thing for a while, but the front end rewrites that are rolling out are really quite good. (Admin is still a tire fire)
- znpy 8y agoWell parts of AWS are cloud desktops, workmail etc... Those are counted on the AWS side. Why shouldn't their Microsoft equivalent be counted?
- sithadmin 8y agoNot 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.
- Yeroc 8y agoI'm not so sure. In the world of large enterprise which is just now waking up and jumping all-in with "digital transformation" projects and "cloud strategies" Microsoft appears to be winning the battle. I work for a company that services large enterprises and anecdotally I'm seeing the majority of them choosing Azure over AWS. I believe this is in large part because Microsoft knows how to sell to enterprises, they have great tie-ins with existing on-prem core infrastructure like Active Directory which is a big deal to large companies. When large enterprises start jumping on board they will move the needle pretty significantly as they ramp-up. I anticipate Azure closing the gap on AWS pretty significantly over the next 2 years.
- amf12 8y agoThe numbers are NOT misleading precisely because they compare the cloud revenue. Google includes GSuite revenue in their cloud revenue. So does Amazon which includes Work Docs. Using their "cloud" revenue to figure out which is a bigger "cloud vendor" is a fallacy.
- crunchlibrarian 8y agoYeah cloud and ML numbers are becoming a running joke in financial circles, at this point I'm pretty sure Oracle counts JRE downloads as cloud revenue somehow. I wish these large corporations didn't demand so much creativity from their accountants to bluster an image.