5 ms·
Microsoft Wallops Amazon in 2020 Cloud Revenue
- DSingularity 6y agoSomething is off here. This can’t be cloud computing like we think when we think AWS.
- jqpabc123 6y agoApples and Oranges --- a good portion of MS cloud revenue is from hosting MS apps which AWS doesn't really compete in.
- baridbelmedar 6y agoThe thing is, cloud is more than just ordinary IaaS these days. Although AWS obviously wants the "cloud" to still be seen primarily as an IaaS thing.
- sidr 6y agoThis definition of cloud is meaningless though - anything that sends a packet via the internet can now be classified as "cloud". This is cearly a marketing ploy to appeal to less-than-savvy enterprise customers.
- baridbelmedar 6y agoI do not think anyone has said that Microsoft's way of defining what the cloud is is more accurate... What I am trying to say is that the criticism that you are "not allowed" to include PaaS and SaaS solutions to the cloud revenue doesn't seem correct either. I understand why someone like AWS would not want that to be the new way of counting. It is profitable to appear as the unthreatened champion of cloud (the default choice), but the fact is that Microsoft is closer in size than what many people may think.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- carlineng 6y agoFrom the article: "I suspect that many still inaccurately equate or conflate “cloud” with “IaaS,” which is a perspective at least a full decade out of date. Without question, Amazon created and still leads the IaaS segment of the cloud—but the cloud of today looks nothing at all like it did 10 years ago when “cloud = IaaS” was a reasonable equation." The "Cloud Revenue" number includes things like Dynamics, 365, etc.
- whimsicalism 6y agoIf you're comparing Microsoft with Amazon on "cloud" revenue than yes, I'm going to assume you're discussing IaaS. Otherwise it's like saying "McDonalds wallops GEICO in burger revenue."
- unethical_ban 6y agoI don't like the tone of that quote - IaaS barely existed a decade ago in its current form; "cloud" back then was SaaS, PaaS and maybe some VM hosting. Cloud has never been "just" S,P, or I "aaS". But it seems clear to me if you're going to write an article comparing any company's so-called Cloud revenue to Amazon, you're going to be comparing IaaS numbers.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y agoI think that's a bit of a red-herring. I feel that increasingly the real difference is between 'end-user facing cloud products' (which essentially always means SaaS) and 'developer-facing cloud products' (which includes all your IaaS/PaaS/some-SaaS). Historically, the term for 'end-user facing cloud SaaS product' was 'a website'; we're just seeing tighter IAM integration in the enterprise space and more powerful products as a result of the increased capabilities of JS engines and better frameworks. The difference is basically "this is stuff developers used to build products" vs "this replaces a shrink-wrap product that would historically have been delivered to a user desktop".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dubcanada 6y agoThese numbers are completely different then other numbers I've seen https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q3/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q3... Microsoft says 13.0 billion, this says 15.3 billion I have no idea where these numbers are from.
- jsnell 6y agoMicrosoft's fiscal year does not line up with the calendar year. Their FY Q3 maps to calendar Q1. Since the article is comparing companies, it's appropriate to use the calendar year.
- chomp 6y agoOffice 365 is huge. Amazon's offering (AWS WorkMail/WorkDocs/etc) doesn't come close.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sidibe 6y agoWhether these companies account for their own use of infrastructure as cloud might be the difference. Do these companies consider all of their own products running on their infrastructure as cloud and therefore consider expenses for those as cloud revenue (and cloud expenses)? Or their kind of separate products like Github, Waymo, etc. Amazon's non-cloud products probably use much much less data center infrastructure than Microsoft and especially Google.
- asah 6y agohaha, the old IBM vs Oracle trick - renewal customers sign contracts that say "cloud" and then count this as "cloud" revenue.
- gordon_freeman 6y agoI think Microsoft also adds their Office 365 subscription revenue in their cloud revenue and AWS doesn't. So it's not apples to apples comparison imo.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoIf Google includes G-Suite (does it? I don't know!) then MS including Office 365 is fair.
- ajross 6y agoIt's not about "fair", it's about whether the products are comparable. Amazon simply doesn't offer online document software a-la Office or G-Suite. (Likewise Microsoft and Google don't offer equivalents to some of esoterica you can find in the AWS menagerie). If you want to do an analysis about who is beating who, you need to compare competing products.
- chomp 6y agohttps://aws.amazon.com/workdocs https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs
- ajross 6y agoYou're right, I forgot that existed. Which is sort of the point: Office 365 is annihilating WorkDocs in the market, and that's important to note if you're doing a competetive analysis of the online office productivity market. But that fact isn't really relevant to a discussion about whether AWS or Azure is capturing more of the cloud hosting market, which is what the headline implies.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoWow, never heard of it - and will it be around in 10+ years time? Has it reached critical-mass to ensure continuity and availability?
- harikb 6y ago
- nova22033 6y agoOn slide 5 of Microsoft’s Q4 earnings presentation, the company says, “Commercial cloud includes Office 365 Includes Office 365..
- geogra4 6y agoSo when is Amazon going to create their own office suite?
- chomp 6y agoThey already have it. https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs https://aws.amazon.com/workmail https://aws.amazon.com/workmail https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces
- jayonsoftware 6y agoI doubt any one want to create an office suite, the last people who tried to do this was Salesforce (with quip buy) and it's now a niche product. No one has an integrated product like Office 365.
- geogra4 6y agoHow is Apples iwork doing these days?
- throw_away_1042 6y agoWhen opensource version of cloud docs/sheets available. Then we will see AWS: X as a Service. I don't think AWS tries to create any non trivial software. Take open source software, slap AWS brand on it, and sell it through the ecosystem it has successfully created. RDS, Document DB, Elastic, EMR and other countless services comes to mind.
- geogra4 6y agoCouldn't they do libreoffice as a service? Doesn't that already exist?
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoBasically, the title of this post and its premise is just very wrong. Microsoft includes Office 365, LinkedIn and probably GitHub in its "cloud" revenue. AWS "cloud" revenue is not remotely comparable. > MSFT: "Our commercial cloud revenue, which includes Office 365 Commercial, Azure, the commercial portion of LinkedIn, Dynamics 365, and other commercial cloud properties, was $16.7 billion and $31.9 billion for the three and six months ended December 31, 2020, respectively, and $12.5 billion and $24.1 billion for the three and six months ended December 31, 2019, respectively. These amounts are primarily included in Office products and cloud services, Server products and cloud services, and LinkedIn in the table above." https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/789019/000156459021002316/msft-10q_20201231.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/789019/00015...
- chomp 6y agoWhy do you say that? AWS includes their work productivity offerings in their bottom line. Why can't Microsoft?
- mef 6y agoFYI the author of the article runs a PR firm and is known for publishing PR pieces masquerading as journalism, e.g. https://www.brightworkresearch.com/how-accurate-was-forbes-on-aws-ibm-microsoft-and-google-in-the-cloud/ https://www.brightworkresearch.com/how-accurate-was-forbes-o... that particular article is a critique of the same author doing a similar spin job for IBM's cloud. one thing noted in that article (and has been noted elsewhere) is that microsoft lumps things like Office365 in their "cloud revenue" which would greatly mask the size of Azure vs. AWS
- Thaxll 6y agoThis website is crap btw guy came from Oracle so it's understandable.
- briffle 6y agothis whole thing is kind of a fun accounting game. If Google used google cloud for its own internal services (adsense, gmail, etc), and billed the different teams, everyone would be talking about the newest cloud leader.
- manishsharan 6y agoIts about messaging and existing channels. Microsoft has a rich ecosystem of VARs and System Integrators and they are effectively leveraging these channels to reach the CIO and IT executives. AWS relies on word of mouth - in organizations where developers and architechts have a say in infrastrucurue -- its always AWS. Sadly , for AWS, only executives have this power in large companies and they will always choose Microsoft.
- sdfhbdf 6y agoClickbaity title, it should read more along lines of „Microsoft Office 365 is bigger than AWS”
- kasperni 6y agoI don't understand why people have so many issues with Microsoft including Office 365 subscriptions in their Cloud revenue. If you have tried managing a tenant you would know that Office 365 subscriptions work pretty much like any other SaaS offering. They just happen to have desktop clients that are better than their online counterparts.