4 ms·

> But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google. Paraphrasing OP: Google knew how to sell ads, not how to sell cloud...

• dilyevsky 7y ago
  And msft sales knew how to sell cloud because they’ve been selling AD and office?
  • jedberg 7y ago
    They had been selling infrastructure (Windows Servers). They already knew how to sell infrastructure. In fact, most of the first sales of Azure were just as an add on to their existing enterprise contracts.
  • WorldMaker 7y ago
    - SQL Server - The Dynamics suite - Visual Studio / TFS - Windows Server family products All of those were "cloud-adjacent" even in their proto-forms as on-premises–only offerings. Even if they weren't "real cloud infrastructure" they were big Capital-E Enterprise products and a lot of selling cloud is still B2B Capital-E Enterprise work at the end of the day.
    • discreteevent 7y ago
      I remember in the late 90s (I think) articles about how MS just didn't get enterprise and would never break in.
    • dilyevsky 7y ago
      Yeah these are on prem software licenses. Completely different from metered virtual infrastructure.
      • WorldMaker 7y ago
        Sure, but the point remains that this was a sales engine that was very similar. It certainly was a faster path for Microsoft to bootstrap cloud sales teams than whatever Google's long, winding path from ad sales to whatever it is they think they are doing with GCP sales. (Though it hasn't seemed to work effectively for IBM. That may just be IBM incompetence as old school commodity-priced Mainframe mentality should be exactly the same as cloud sales. There's probably an amusing alternate world where IBM Cloud is using something like 1950s presentations only slightly modified to sell "cloud" in 2020, just because they could.)
      • jedberg 7y ago
        You're not thinking big enough. It's not about the specific thing you're selling, it's the skillset. Microsoft sales has a skillset of going into a company, talking to the CIO/COO/CTO/CEO and selling them infrastructure to run their business. Google has the skills of going to the CMO or the marketing manager and selling them advertising. Which of those skill sets translates more directly to selling cloud infrastructure?
      • freepor 7y ago
        Doesn’t matter, it’s the relationships that count. People from Microsoft eat filet mignons with the top 50 IT execs at every major company. That’s why any turd of an MS product can immediately get tens of millions of paying users.