13 ms·

Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

211 points by simula67 7y ago

Pandabob 7y ago
Meh. I'd wish Microsoft and Google would start separating their actual cloud platform (Azure, GCP) revenues from their "cloud" SaaS revenue (Office 365, G Suite). It'd make comparisons to AWS a lot more meaningful. Edit: Apparently Microsoft is already doing this.
- belltaco 7y ago
  This has become a meme and urban legend at this point, but Office 365 revenue isn't included in Azure's revenue. G Suite is included in GCP revenue though.
  - cthalupa 7y ago
    TechCrunch says differently: >Turning to Microsoft, it reported a combined cloud revenue, which includes SaaS (Office 365, Dynamics, etc.) and cloud computing (Azure), of $12.5 billion for the quarter. Could you provide a source? I can certainly believe TC is wrong, but contradictory information isn't great.
    - samspenc 7y ago
      From https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2... "Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $11.8 billion and increased 17% (up 19% in constant currency), with the following business highlights: · Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 16% (up 18% in constant currency) driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 27% (up 30% in constant currency) · Office Consumer products and cloud services revenue increased 19% (up 20% in constant currency) with continued growth in Office 365 Consumer subscribers to 37.2 million · LinkedIn revenue increased 24% (up 26% in constant currency) · Dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 12% (up 15% in constant currency) driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 42% (up 45% in constant currency) Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $11.9 billion and increased 27% (up 28% in constant currency), with the following business highlights: · Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 62% (up 64% in constant currency)" So Office 365 falls under category "Productivity and Business Processes", while Azure as well as 'server products' and 'enterprise services' fall under "Intelligent Cloud". Their third category is "Personal Computing" which was $13.2 billion and includes Windows, Surface, Search / advertising (I guess Bing), Xbox.
      - cthalupa 7y ago
        Thanks! Seems like TC needs to get up to date :) Edit: Does this include SPLA licensing? Trying to figure out what all is in there besides Azure.
      - sz4kerto 7y ago
        Azure cannot be at 12B per quarter, it'd be larger than AWS. I still don't understand the numbers. :)
        webpaymentsguy 7y ago
        It's not, if you scroll up there's a fellow who determined it's closer to 2.5b a quarter for Azure.
        gamblor956 7y ago
        "Azure" the broad marketing catch-all is 12B per quarter. Azure the PaaS and associated cloud offerings are much less. The root of the problem is that MS decided to expand what "Azure" is for marketing and financial reporting purposes beyond its PaaS origins.
  - discordance 7y ago
    It looks like this has changed [0]. Microsoft now places Office365 under “ Productivity and Business Processes”, which earned 11.8b in FY20 Q2. Azure is under “Intelligent Cloud”, which earned $11.9b this last quarter. 0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2...
    - Pandabob 7y ago
      Thanks for bringing this up.
    - alpb 7y ago
      Based on that last sentence, Azure has a 12*4=48B$ annual run rate. AWS has $40B annual run rate (https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-brings-in-nearly-10b-in-sales-for-amazon-in-q4/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-brings-in-nearly-10b-in-sa...) Something is not quite adding up.
      - seanhunter 7y ago
        See below thread, but Azure + Enterprise services + server products are reported as "Intelligent cloud". It's intelligent cloud that has the $48bn run rate. So it's not a like-for-like comparison with AWS even though it doesn't include Office365.
    - victords 7y ago
      Follow up question: It would be interesting to see the market share and revenues excluding the use from the own company or different orgs. E.g.: AWS without the Amazon Website use, Azure without the Office use, etc. Is there any public information about it available?
      - briffle 7y ago
        On the flip side, if Google started 'buying' capacity from GCP for their search, ad, and other infrastructure, they would be the largest cloud vendor tomorrow by most measurements.
- sk0g 7y ago
  Maybe that's precisely why they are _not_ doing it. AWS is likely winning compared to them both, and having easily accessible, official market share figures could deter customers who want to avoid the "second best".
- filoleg 7y ago
  Why should Google and Microsoft separate those just because AWS doesn't make much in their "cloud" SaaS revenue, despite the fact that AWS doesn't separate it either?
  - 8ytecoder 7y ago
    Because one is about infrastructure and the other is about Software? Just because it’s in the cloud doesn’t mean they are the same.
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
      Where do you draw the line? If I use the BigQuery UI to analyze data, is that "infra" or "software"? I use Cloud AI Notebooks to spin up a private Jupyter notebook in the Cloud, is that "infra" or "software"?
  - mlazos 7y ago
    Yeah I find it interesting that all of the cloud providers do this when in reality it benefits microsoft the most, since they make the most money from their office suite
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Office 365 is not counted in cloud revenue. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-revenue-up-14-on-office-365-and-azure-growth/ https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-reven...
      - mlazos 7y ago
        Lol I work at ms and got this wrong, oops! I think this is a recent occurrence though right?
- jmartinpetersen 7y ago
  What are you trying to decide based on their cloud platform revenue? I'm genuinely curious as to why it matters if they are huge or actually the largest on the planet.
  - discordance 7y ago
    A fair market comparison and based on that, where to invest.
    - muricayeah 7y ago
      Shouldn't it be more important how it can grow, and current costumer satisfaction so they don't switch? Current market only accounts the "now", you need to access possibilities and risk to understand if a stock price is cheap or expensive.
- Karishma1234 7y ago
  While providing breakdown of the services makes sense at many levels, it is understandable that Google would add GSuite revenue to cloud. Technically it is a cloud service and it is something Amazon lacks. For many businesess today the first thing done after incorporation is buying Gsuite subscription to give employees access to email. Even opening a cloud account might come after that.
- moksly 7y ago
  It’s a little unrelated but Azure and Office 365 are becoming the same thing in large enterprise, utilising the same Azure AD, letting you run the same powershell/python managed services on your office 365 platform from your Azure platform. Utilising things like OIOSAML for multi-organisational setups for IDM with a mix of local, azure AD and office 365 account management. I personally prefer things like digital ocean or even heroku becaus they are so much easier to use and manage, but it’s really hard to build a business case on non-azure when you have 365, and there is no alternative to 365 if you’re in a GDPR sector. We have plenty of procurement projects that are hosted in AWS by private suppliers, so it’s not like we’re somehow against other cloud vendors, it just doesn’t make sense to not chose Azure when you have 365, because that means you’re already partly there and already have the Microsoft certified and trained it staff.
  - kthejoker2 7y ago
    And even more specifically, that Azure has been approved as a third party cloud vendor by your internal security, procurement, legal, and audit teams - no mean feat at lots of organizations.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    What's special about Office 365 wrt GDPR?
georgewfraser 7y ago
I would really love to know what the quarterly revenue is for just compute and storage, for each of the major cloud providers. Including things like G Suite and Office 365 just muddies the waters.
- bhouston 7y ago
  I completely agree. Both Microsoft and Google only release inflated cloud numbers, I guess to look more competitive with Amazon. This way Google only looks like a 1/4 of Amazon rather than maybe 1/8.... Edit: according to other comments Microsoft's numbers are no longer inflated.
  - ripvanwinkle 7y ago
    Doing some rudimentary math on the below statements suggests Azure proper is about 20% of 11.9 Billion i.e. approx 2.38 Billion. The rest of it is from Windows Server and other server products like SQL Server, SharePoint ... and Enterprise services. As an example SQL server running in AWS also counts in that number. <quote> "Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $11.9 billion and increased 27% (up 28% in constant currency), with the following business highlights: Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 62% (up 64% in constant currency) Enterprise Services revenue increased 6% (up 7% in constant currency) " </end quote>
  - webpaymentsguy 7y ago
    It's 'inflated' as in a large section of their enterprise software is included with Azure, similar to GCP with G suite. That being said, Amazon Chime and Workdocs are also included in AWS revenue, but probably make up a much less significant portion of AWS revenue compared to GCP and Azure.
  - random001 7y ago
    It's still inflated because azure revenue is counted with other server products like Windows Server, SQL server and Enterprise mobility under the 'Intelligent Cloud' division.
- 7y ago
iandanforth 7y ago
Aside: This was the first time I've tried to read a techcrunch article in Austria (or the EU in general). The splash screen implies I must consent to tracking cookies or I can't view their content. Is that not illegal?
- PietdeVries 7y ago
  For me it redirects to a page from https://guce.advertising.com https://guce.advertising.com, telling me my browser is out of date and that I have to go to browsehappy.com to get a new one...
  - Spare_account 7y ago
    uMatrix blocked me from viewing guce.advertising.com I disabled uMatrix in a Private tab but my pihole blocked advertising.com too. I nearly gave up thinking "I don't need to see TechCrunch, their loss" but then I remembered the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20200206070011/https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/03/alphabet-earnings-show-google-cloud-on-10b-run-rate/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200206070011/https://techcrunc... The article loads but after a few seconds it auto forwards to a page that doesn't exist on the TechCrunch site. I get about 3 seconds to read it.
    - virgilp 7y ago
      You're right. Disable javascript on [*.]archive.org, and you can read techcrunch just fine. Arguably, better :D TL;DR: Google cloud revenue includes Saas offerings (docs, gmail etc), in addition to the infrastructure part. They may make roughly 2.5bln per quarter now, but it's still small compared to Microsoft (12.5bln per quarter, includes Azure + Office/outlook) or Amazon (10bln per quarter, AWS only). What is impressive is the growth of the business unit - more than 50% in the last year (they do have to keep it up at the same rate for 4 more years to catch up to competitors though)
    - glenneroo 7y ago
      > I get about 3 seconds to read it. This trick apparently still works: after the page loads and before it disappears, hit ESC. Instant-freeze and you can read the article! :)
davedx 7y ago
Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.
- bottled_poe 7y ago
  The providers are already financially incentivised to minimise their power consumption. I’m not sure any change is needed. I suppose the power source might be relevant to the customer (eg. Coal vs hydro, etc).
- f_allwein 7y ago
  Google found this: https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-google-microsoft-green-clouds-and-hyperscale-data-centers/ https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-google-microsoft-green-cl...
  - PunchTornado 7y ago
    so amazon the worst. google does quite well.
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    How effective are carbon credits at eliminating footprint? If company X runs an efficient datacenter with 80 GW wind and 20 GW coal power, and company Y runs a dumpy datacenter with 200 GW coal power, but company Y buys 200 credits, is company X still the one doing the most harm?
    - barney54 7y ago
      It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. Data centers are all grid connected, so what really matters is the composition of generators on the grid (or at least the composition on the generators near the datacenter).
      - 7y ago
neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/kjOTs https://archive.md/kjOTs
mohamedattahri 7y ago
Article is missing the point. Growth is not the hardest problem in a fast-growing market. The real question is whether they're growing faster than their competitors, and that's unlikely.
- redwood 7y ago
  Do you mean in terms of revenue dollars growth, revenue percent growth? Total number of customers growth? Growth amongst solo devs? Growth amongst fortune 500? There are many ways to look at this
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    % growth of revenues among the top cloud providers is the normal comparison.
    - redwood 7y ago
      It would be shocking if Google were in last place by that metric! After all their baseline is so much lower. Are they really?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  Per this quarter's results, AWS grew at 37% while GCP notched up 54%. Microsoft claims 62%, but as discussed elsewhere in the comments that seems dubious (unless you also believe that Azure is already larger than AWS). MS "Intelligent Cloud" grew at 27%. https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud-market-share/ https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...
- Crash0v3rid3 7y ago
  If they're all growing why does it matter? Clearly Cloud market in general is growing and all 3 companies want a piece of the pie. If they can all make a sizable business from the growth it doesn't matter who is growing the fastest or who is the largest.
blinotz 7y ago
Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down. Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform. Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important though. Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause they’ll shut it down.
- reacweb 7y ago
  My pipedream theory about that is that Google has an AI for modeling Alphabet. If the service was normal (not that terrible), google cloud would be such a success that there would be a trial for monopoly and Alphabet would be crushed. My theory is that google tries to ensure it will earn a lot of money as long as possible and this means not killing the golden goose by being too greedy or too dominent on a market.
- blinotz 7y ago
  Google was the natural “winner” of the cloud computing game. Google has internet in its DNA it never did anything else but internet. But it failed to see the opportunity in the first place. Secondly I attribute its lack of customer service to its recruiting and hiring practice.... it only ever hired the most geeky of geeky academics. And geeky academics are the opposite of human relationship oriented. Thus everyone at google designed the company to avoid human contact. And that surely the complete opposite of customer service. Google has the inverse of good customer service DNA... it has “hide from and avoid customer contact” DNA. And that’s what has sunk the google cloud. $10B might sound like a lot, but to me it sounds like a gigantic fail.
  - whatitdobooboo 7y ago
    I agree, Google is not enterprise focused as far as I can tell. Microsoft is and that why Azure has been able to do so well so quickly. It's impressive to me that Amazon was able to shift focus to AWS without much existing presence in enterprise tech stacks.
xyst 7y ago
I hate how we are just giving away control over the internet to Amazon/Google. How does a small cloud provider stay in business when up against these multi billion dollar companies? At any point in time, these companies can just lower the cost of their products, and suffer through a few bad quarters while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Big giants fighting each other giving free computing to small startups? I call that a win for the little guy.
  - Dirlewanger 7y ago
    That's not the problem. It's when the little guys try to compete with what the big giants are doing and get completely blocked out. Amazon/Google are all about being magnanimous and supporting startup growth, just as long as they are getting a piece of the action and that it doesn't threaten their market duopoly too much.
    - conanbatt 7y ago
      Not every market and product needs to be accessible to the little guy. Things like infrastructure have huge scale benefits, and if the big guys are doing it at modest profits already and some at a loss it's very economically efficient.
- snarf21 7y ago
  They have to target a different market. They have to provide customer support. They need to provide a lot of white glove services. They have to offer "tours of our facility" to those who think that has value. This could be businesses like lawyers but not tech businesses.
- badtooling 7y ago
  People would listen to your opinion if you were at least knowledgable. And if you were, youd know that Google is a distant 4th in cloud. (since you say internet, I'm including non-us providers too)
screye 7y ago
Google is the Valve of the internet space. Like Valve they have created products that took over the whole space. They have a tendency to completely drop things when they don't pick up traction early enough. (artifact, everything Google) There used to be a Halo around both companies in the 2000s, that was slowly eroded in the 2010s. They suck at communicating. They create good products that never see the light of day again (Portal, l4D,Half Life) because their main product (steam, ads) makes so much more money. ________ GCP has the same problem as Artifact, where Google bull headedly tries to enter a different type of product/business model (b2b, instead of b2c) without adopting any of the cultural must-haves of a b2c company. (customer before product, service, reliability over speed) Tensorflowv2 is failing due to a similar kind of stubbornness. _______________ The scary thing is, if Google manages to pull off the culture change (unlikely), I can see them sweeping both AWS and Azure in the cloud space.
- zantana 7y ago
  I think implicit in this myopia is they don't eat their own dogfood. If they have their best people managing their core products running their own infrastructure which is clearly much more reliable than GCP, then GCP won't get better. On top of which their best people will move toward their own internal services. Contrast this with the other cloud providers who seem to be using their own clouds for their primary services creating a feedback loop which ensures they don't have the big outages that GCP has had over the past year.
  - milesward 7y ago
    Not true.
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      Could you elaborate?
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Dogfooding usually helps with usability. I'm not sure it has much to do with big outages; GCP is big enough that all the individual decisionmakers are pretty maximally incentivized not to break it.
diminish 7y ago
Does GCP still have a cost advantage compared to AWS and Azure?
- milesward 7y ago
  Yes, for most use-cases. Google "understanding cloud pricing"
- gamblor956 7y ago
  It can, right up until Google decides to change the pricing structure on 30 days notice to make everything several times more expensive than before without any provision for grandfathering or transitioning existing clients. My company had to switch off GCP entirely due to pricing changes increasing costs by nearly 5x! AWS and Azure are both much better about launching new pricing structures, and generally when they make something more expensive its because they're adding new features (and corresponding price tiers).
morerunes 7y ago
I hate to be that guy, but why is it called Butt services?
- bgrainger 7y ago
  Most likely, you have a browser extension installed that changes "Cloud" to "Butt": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Because you installed that one extension that changes cloud to butt a while back as a joke and apparently somehow forgot you did.
  - morerunes 7y ago
    Bahahaha I've been pranked! Either by a coworker or possibly myself.
shahsyed 7y ago
Even looking at comparative offerings from different providers, they're really lackluster [1], and in some cases, even more expensive [2]. What could be contributing to those large numbers? [1] - Memorystore only allows vertical scaling, no support for GCP managed Redis clusters, no hybrid functionality (only instances in the same VPC network can access Memorystore, whereas ElastiCache offers all of this. https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/networking https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/networking https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/scaling-instances https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/scaling-inst... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/accessing-elasticache.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/Scaling.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/ https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/ vs. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/
- ssambros 7y ago
  To be fair, it seems Memorystore instance is not the same gb-for-gb as Elasticache, since Memorystore gives you extra memory overhead, and on aws you have to manage it yourself. Memorystore also has free network egress/ingress. There is also a RedisLabs offering on Google Cloud with integrated billing. Disclaimer: I work at Google Cloud.
  - pdeva1 7y ago
    what do you mean by ‘extra memory overhead’
    - ssambros 7y ago
      if you run Redis you need at least 25% of extra RAM on top the instance memorysize if you want to avoid a lot of nasty OOM scenarios. Memorystore gives this memory by default and in aws you need to tweak the reserved-memory. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/redis-memory-management.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/...
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Conflating consumer software and cloud infrastructure is a big lie. Microsoft is famous for having started this years ago. Why do they do it? Because AWS is at a $40B run rate, and both Google and Microsoft have to show analysts and customers that they are catching up, and that they are big enough, etc. Real "cloud infrastructure" revenues for Google are probably less than half that. The worst part is that famed and well-paid analysts perpetrate the lie, either by collusion, or by ignorance.
- milesward 7y ago
  This number does not include that conflation...
  - jsight 7y ago
    The article says that it does, as it includes enterprise gmail/drive/chat revenue with the infrastructure revenue.
rudolph9 7y ago
kubernetes on google cloud rocks. If they kill gcp like they do with other random services I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, kubernetes is open source and there are lots of other provider. For now, I don’t feel trapped in the least, it’s a great serive, it’s priced right, and the time I save not dealing with AWS nonsense far out weighs the potential downsides of using their services.
- arcticfox 7y ago
  Cloud Run is so freaking cool too, and it's a nice combination of totally hosted and totally portable (since you can just run it on k8s if GCP dies)

211 points by simula67 7y ago

Meh. I'd wish Microsoft and Google would start separating their actual cloud platform (Azure, GCP) revenues from their "cloud" SaaS revenue (Office 365, G Suite). It'd make comparisons to AWS a lot more meaningful. Edit: Apparently Microsoft is already doing this.

belltaco 7y ago
This has become a meme and urban legend at this point, but Office 365 revenue isn't included in Azure's revenue. G Suite is included in GCP revenue though.
- cthalupa 7y ago
  TechCrunch says differently: >Turning to Microsoft, it reported a combined cloud revenue, which includes SaaS (Office 365, Dynamics, etc.) and cloud computing (Azure), of $12.5 billion for the quarter. Could you provide a source? I can certainly believe TC is wrong, but contradictory information isn't great.
  - samspenc 7y ago
    From https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2... "Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $11.8 billion and increased 17% (up 19% in constant currency), with the following business highlights: · Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 16% (up 18% in constant currency) driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 27% (up 30% in constant currency) · Office Consumer products and cloud services revenue increased 19% (up 20% in constant currency) with continued growth in Office 365 Consumer subscribers to 37.2 million · LinkedIn revenue increased 24% (up 26% in constant currency) · Dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 12% (up 15% in constant currency) driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 42% (up 45% in constant currency) Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $11.9 billion and increased 27% (up 28% in constant currency), with the following business highlights: · Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 62% (up 64% in constant currency)" So Office 365 falls under category "Productivity and Business Processes", while Azure as well as 'server products' and 'enterprise services' fall under "Intelligent Cloud". Their third category is "Personal Computing" which was $13.2 billion and includes Windows, Surface, Search / advertising (I guess Bing), Xbox.
    - cthalupa 7y ago
      Thanks! Seems like TC needs to get up to date :) Edit: Does this include SPLA licensing? Trying to figure out what all is in there besides Azure.
    - sz4kerto 7y ago
      Azure cannot be at 12B per quarter, it'd be larger than AWS. I still don't understand the numbers. :)
      - webpaymentsguy 7y ago
        It's not, if you scroll up there's a fellow who determined it's closer to 2.5b a quarter for Azure.
      - gamblor956 7y ago
        "Azure" the broad marketing catch-all is 12B per quarter. Azure the PaaS and associated cloud offerings are much less. The root of the problem is that MS decided to expand what "Azure" is for marketing and financial reporting purposes beyond its PaaS origins.
- discordance 7y ago
  It looks like this has changed [0]. Microsoft now places Office365 under “ Productivity and Business Processes”, which earned 11.8b in FY20 Q2. Azure is under “Intelligent Cloud”, which earned $11.9b this last quarter. 0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2...
  - Pandabob 7y ago
    Thanks for bringing this up.
  - alpb 7y ago
    Based on that last sentence, Azure has a 12*4=48B$ annual run rate. AWS has $40B annual run rate (https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-brings-in-nearly-10b-in-sales-for-amazon-in-q4/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-brings-in-nearly-10b-in-sa...) Something is not quite adding up.
    - seanhunter 7y ago
      See below thread, but Azure + Enterprise services + server products are reported as "Intelligent cloud". It's intelligent cloud that has the $48bn run rate. So it's not a like-for-like comparison with AWS even though it doesn't include Office365.
  - victords 7y ago
    Follow up question: It would be interesting to see the market share and revenues excluding the use from the own company or different orgs. E.g.: AWS without the Amazon Website use, Azure without the Office use, etc. Is there any public information about it available?
    - briffle 7y ago
      On the flip side, if Google started 'buying' capacity from GCP for their search, ad, and other infrastructure, they would be the largest cloud vendor tomorrow by most measurements.
sk0g 7y ago
Maybe that's precisely why they are _not_ doing it. AWS is likely winning compared to them both, and having easily accessible, official market share figures could deter customers who want to avoid the "second best".
filoleg 7y ago
Why should Google and Microsoft separate those just because AWS doesn't make much in their "cloud" SaaS revenue, despite the fact that AWS doesn't separate it either?
- 8ytecoder 7y ago
  Because one is about infrastructure and the other is about Software? Just because it’s in the cloud doesn’t mean they are the same.
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    Where do you draw the line? If I use the BigQuery UI to analyze data, is that "infra" or "software"? I use Cloud AI Notebooks to spin up a private Jupyter notebook in the Cloud, is that "infra" or "software"?
- mlazos 7y ago
  Yeah I find it interesting that all of the cloud providers do this when in reality it benefits microsoft the most, since they make the most money from their office suite
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Office 365 is not counted in cloud revenue. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-revenue-up-14-on-office-365-and-azure-growth/ https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-reven...
    - mlazos 7y ago
      Lol I work at ms and got this wrong, oops! I think this is a recent occurrence though right?
jmartinpetersen 7y ago
What are you trying to decide based on their cloud platform revenue? I'm genuinely curious as to why it matters if they are huge or actually the largest on the planet.
- discordance 7y ago
  A fair market comparison and based on that, where to invest.
  - muricayeah 7y ago
    Shouldn't it be more important how it can grow, and current costumer satisfaction so they don't switch? Current market only accounts the "now", you need to access possibilities and risk to understand if a stock price is cheap or expensive.
Karishma1234 7y ago
While providing breakdown of the services makes sense at many levels, it is understandable that Google would add GSuite revenue to cloud. Technically it is a cloud service and it is something Amazon lacks. For many businesess today the first thing done after incorporation is buying Gsuite subscription to give employees access to email. Even opening a cloud account might come after that.
moksly 7y ago
It’s a little unrelated but Azure and Office 365 are becoming the same thing in large enterprise, utilising the same Azure AD, letting you run the same powershell/python managed services on your office 365 platform from your Azure platform. Utilising things like OIOSAML for multi-organisational setups for IDM with a mix of local, azure AD and office 365 account management. I personally prefer things like digital ocean or even heroku becaus they are so much easier to use and manage, but it’s really hard to build a business case on non-azure when you have 365, and there is no alternative to 365 if you’re in a GDPR sector. We have plenty of procurement projects that are hosted in AWS by private suppliers, so it’s not like we’re somehow against other cloud vendors, it just doesn’t make sense to not chose Azure when you have 365, because that means you’re already partly there and already have the Microsoft certified and trained it staff.
- kthejoker2 7y ago
  And even more specifically, that Azure has been approved as a third party cloud vendor by your internal security, procurement, legal, and audit teams - no mean feat at lots of organizations.
- int_19h 7y ago
  What's special about Office 365 wrt GDPR?

georgewfraser 7y ago

I would really love to know what the quarterly revenue is for just compute and storage, for each of the major cloud providers. Including things like G Suite and Office 365 just muddies the waters.

bhouston 7y ago
I completely agree. Both Microsoft and Google only release inflated cloud numbers, I guess to look more competitive with Amazon. This way Google only looks like a 1/4 of Amazon rather than maybe 1/8.... Edit: according to other comments Microsoft's numbers are no longer inflated.
- ripvanwinkle 7y ago
  Doing some rudimentary math on the below statements suggests Azure proper is about 20% of 11.9 Billion i.e. approx 2.38 Billion. The rest of it is from Windows Server and other server products like SQL Server, SharePoint ... and Enterprise services. As an example SQL server running in AWS also counts in that number. <quote> "Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $11.9 billion and increased 27% (up 28% in constant currency), with the following business highlights: Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 62% (up 64% in constant currency) Enterprise Services revenue increased 6% (up 7% in constant currency) " </end quote>
- webpaymentsguy 7y ago
  It's 'inflated' as in a large section of their enterprise software is included with Azure, similar to GCP with G suite. That being said, Amazon Chime and Workdocs are also included in AWS revenue, but probably make up a much less significant portion of AWS revenue compared to GCP and Azure.
- random001 7y ago
  It's still inflated because azure revenue is counted with other server products like Windows Server, SQL server and Enterprise mobility under the 'Intelligent Cloud' division.
7y ago

iandanforth 7y ago

Aside: This was the first time I've tried to read a techcrunch article in Austria (or the EU in general). The splash screen implies I must consent to tracking cookies or I can't view their content. Is that not illegal?

PietdeVries 7y ago
For me it redirects to a page from https://guce.advertising.com https://guce.advertising.com, telling me my browser is out of date and that I have to go to browsehappy.com to get a new one...
- Spare_account 7y ago
  uMatrix blocked me from viewing guce.advertising.com I disabled uMatrix in a Private tab but my pihole blocked advertising.com too. I nearly gave up thinking "I don't need to see TechCrunch, their loss" but then I remembered the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20200206070011/https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/03/alphabet-earnings-show-google-cloud-on-10b-run-rate/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200206070011/https://techcrunc... The article loads but after a few seconds it auto forwards to a page that doesn't exist on the TechCrunch site. I get about 3 seconds to read it.
  - virgilp 7y ago
    You're right. Disable javascript on [*.]archive.org, and you can read techcrunch just fine. Arguably, better :D TL;DR: Google cloud revenue includes Saas offerings (docs, gmail etc), in addition to the infrastructure part. They may make roughly 2.5bln per quarter now, but it's still small compared to Microsoft (12.5bln per quarter, includes Azure + Office/outlook) or Amazon (10bln per quarter, AWS only). What is impressive is the growth of the business unit - more than 50% in the last year (they do have to keep it up at the same rate for 4 more years to catch up to competitors though)
  - glenneroo 7y ago
    > I get about 3 seconds to read it. This trick apparently still works: after the page loads and before it disappears, hit ESC. Instant-freeze and you can read the article! :)

davedx 7y ago

Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.

bottled_poe 7y ago
The providers are already financially incentivised to minimise their power consumption. I’m not sure any change is needed. I suppose the power source might be relevant to the customer (eg. Coal vs hydro, etc).
f_allwein 7y ago
Google found this: https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-google-microsoft-green-clouds-and-hyperscale-data-centers/ https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-google-microsoft-green-cl...
- PunchTornado 7y ago
  so amazon the worst. google does quite well.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  How effective are carbon credits at eliminating footprint? If company X runs an efficient datacenter with 80 GW wind and 20 GW coal power, and company Y runs a dumpy datacenter with 200 GW coal power, but company Y buys 200 credits, is company X still the one doing the most harm?
  - barney54 7y ago
    It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. Data centers are all grid connected, so what really matters is the composition of generators on the grid (or at least the composition on the generators near the datacenter).
    - 7y ago

neonate 7y ago

https://archive.md/kjOTs https://archive.md/kjOTs

mohamedattahri 7y ago

Article is missing the point. Growth is not the hardest problem in a fast-growing market. The real question is whether they're growing faster than their competitors, and that's unlikely.

redwood 7y ago
Do you mean in terms of revenue dollars growth, revenue percent growth? Total number of customers growth? Growth amongst solo devs? Growth amongst fortune 500? There are many ways to look at this
- koheripbal 7y ago
  % growth of revenues among the top cloud providers is the normal comparison.
  - redwood 7y ago
    It would be shocking if Google were in last place by that metric! After all their baseline is so much lower. Are they really?
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
Per this quarter's results, AWS grew at 37% while GCP notched up 54%. Microsoft claims 62%, but as discussed elsewhere in the comments that seems dubious (unless you also believe that Azure is already larger than AWS). MS "Intelligent Cloud" grew at 27%. https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud-market-share/ https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...
Crash0v3rid3 7y ago
If they're all growing why does it matter? Clearly Cloud market in general is growing and all 3 companies want a piece of the pie. If they can all make a sizable business from the growth it doesn't matter who is growing the fastest or who is the largest.

blinotz 7y ago

Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down. Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform. Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important though. Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause they’ll shut it down.

reacweb 7y ago
My pipedream theory about that is that Google has an AI for modeling Alphabet. If the service was normal (not that terrible), google cloud would be such a success that there would be a trial for monopoly and Alphabet would be crushed. My theory is that google tries to ensure it will earn a lot of money as long as possible and this means not killing the golden goose by being too greedy or too dominent on a market.
blinotz 7y ago
Google was the natural “winner” of the cloud computing game. Google has internet in its DNA it never did anything else but internet. But it failed to see the opportunity in the first place. Secondly I attribute its lack of customer service to its recruiting and hiring practice.... it only ever hired the most geeky of geeky academics. And geeky academics are the opposite of human relationship oriented. Thus everyone at google designed the company to avoid human contact. And that surely the complete opposite of customer service. Google has the inverse of good customer service DNA... it has “hide from and avoid customer contact” DNA. And that’s what has sunk the google cloud. $10B might sound like a lot, but to me it sounds like a gigantic fail.
- whatitdobooboo 7y ago
  I agree, Google is not enterprise focused as far as I can tell. Microsoft is and that why Azure has been able to do so well so quickly. It's impressive to me that Amazon was able to shift focus to AWS without much existing presence in enterprise tech stacks.

xyst 7y ago

I hate how we are just giving away control over the internet to Amazon/Google. How does a small cloud provider stay in business when up against these multi billion dollar companies? At any point in time, these companies can just lower the cost of their products, and suffer through a few bad quarters while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die.

conanbatt 7y ago
Big giants fighting each other giving free computing to small startups? I call that a win for the little guy.
- Dirlewanger 7y ago
  That's not the problem. It's when the little guys try to compete with what the big giants are doing and get completely blocked out. Amazon/Google are all about being magnanimous and supporting startup growth, just as long as they are getting a piece of the action and that it doesn't threaten their market duopoly too much.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    Not every market and product needs to be accessible to the little guy. Things like infrastructure have huge scale benefits, and if the big guys are doing it at modest profits already and some at a loss it's very economically efficient.
snarf21 7y ago
They have to target a different market. They have to provide customer support. They need to provide a lot of white glove services. They have to offer "tours of our facility" to those who think that has value. This could be businesses like lawyers but not tech businesses.
badtooling 7y ago
People would listen to your opinion if you were at least knowledgable. And if you were, youd know that Google is a distant 4th in cloud. (since you say internet, I'm including non-us providers too)

screye 7y ago

Google is the Valve of the internet space. Like Valve they have created products that took over the whole space. They have a tendency to completely drop things when they don't pick up traction early enough. (artifact, everything Google) There used to be a Halo around both companies in the 2000s, that was slowly eroded in the 2010s. They suck at communicating. They create good products that never see the light of day again (Portal, l4D,Half Life) because their main product (steam, ads) makes so much more money. ________ GCP has the same problem as Artifact, where Google bull headedly tries to enter a different type of product/business model (b2b, instead of b2c) without adopting any of the cultural must-haves of a b2c company. (customer before product, service, reliability over speed) Tensorflowv2 is failing due to a similar kind of stubbornness. _______________ The scary thing is, if Google manages to pull off the culture change (unlikely), I can see them sweeping both AWS and Azure in the cloud space.

zantana 7y ago
I think implicit in this myopia is they don't eat their own dogfood. If they have their best people managing their core products running their own infrastructure which is clearly much more reliable than GCP, then GCP won't get better. On top of which their best people will move toward their own internal services. Contrast this with the other cloud providers who seem to be using their own clouds for their primary services creating a feedback loop which ensures they don't have the big outages that GCP has had over the past year.
- milesward 7y ago
  Not true.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    Could you elaborate?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Dogfooding usually helps with usability. I'm not sure it has much to do with big outages; GCP is big enough that all the individual decisionmakers are pretty maximally incentivized not to break it.

diminish 7y ago

Does GCP still have a cost advantage compared to AWS and Azure?

milesward 7y ago
Yes, for most use-cases. Google "understanding cloud pricing"
gamblor956 7y ago
It can, right up until Google decides to change the pricing structure on 30 days notice to make everything several times more expensive than before without any provision for grandfathering or transitioning existing clients. My company had to switch off GCP entirely due to pricing changes increasing costs by nearly 5x! AWS and Azure are both much better about launching new pricing structures, and generally when they make something more expensive its because they're adding new features (and corresponding price tiers).

morerunes 7y ago

I hate to be that guy, but why is it called Butt services?

bgrainger 7y ago
Most likely, you have a browser extension installed that changes "Cloud" to "Butt": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
vikramkr 7y ago
Because you installed that one extension that changes cloud to butt a while back as a joke and apparently somehow forgot you did.
- morerunes 7y ago
  Bahahaha I've been pranked! Either by a coworker or possibly myself.

shahsyed 7y ago

Even looking at comparative offerings from different providers, they're really lackluster [1], and in some cases, even more expensive [2]. What could be contributing to those large numbers? [1] - Memorystore only allows vertical scaling, no support for GCP managed Redis clusters, no hybrid functionality (only instances in the same VPC network can access Memorystore, whereas ElastiCache offers all of this. https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/networking https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/networking https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/scaling-instances https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/scaling-inst... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/accessing-elasticache.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/Scaling.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/ https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/ vs. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/

ssambros 7y ago
To be fair, it seems Memorystore instance is not the same gb-for-gb as Elasticache, since Memorystore gives you extra memory overhead, and on aws you have to manage it yourself. Memorystore also has free network egress/ingress. There is also a RedisLabs offering on Google Cloud with integrated billing. Disclaimer: I work at Google Cloud.
- pdeva1 7y ago
  what do you mean by ‘extra memory overhead’
  - ssambros 7y ago
    if you run Redis you need at least 25% of extra RAM on top the instance memorysize if you want to avoid a lot of nasty OOM scenarios. Memorystore gives this memory by default and in aws you need to tweak the reserved-memory. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/redis-memory-management.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/...

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

Conflating consumer software and cloud infrastructure is a big lie. Microsoft is famous for having started this years ago. Why do they do it? Because AWS is at a $40B run rate, and both Google and Microsoft have to show analysts and customers that they are catching up, and that they are big enough, etc. Real "cloud infrastructure" revenues for Google are probably less than half that. The worst part is that famed and well-paid analysts perpetrate the lie, either by collusion, or by ignorance.

milesward 7y ago
This number does not include that conflation...
- jsight 7y ago
  The article says that it does, as it includes enterprise gmail/drive/chat revenue with the infrastructure revenue.

rudolph9 7y ago

kubernetes on google cloud rocks. If they kill gcp like they do with other random services I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, kubernetes is open source and there are lots of other provider. For now, I don’t feel trapped in the least, it’s a great serive, it’s priced right, and the time I save not dealing with AWS nonsense far out weighs the potential downsides of using their services.

arcticfox 7y ago
Cloud Run is so freaking cool too, and it's a nice combination of totally hosted and totally portable (since you can just run it on k8s if GCP dies)