8 ms·
Microsoft in talks to sign on Amazon as customer in $1B cloud tools deal
- booi 3y agoAmazon doesn’t strike me as a place that needs traditional productivity software but perhaps less combative deal than trying to work with google?
- tonyhart7 3y ago??? amazon would want to build office suite themselves ??, I mean every company in the world need an office suites etc no matter how big
- dgrin91 3y agoWhat about things like email or shared drives? Excel & Word? etc, etc.
- Analemma_ 3y agoI mean, it's a business like any other; they still need email and spreadsheets (actually, they probably need more spreadsheets than the average business). When I was at Amazon, they already did use Office, except it was an on-prem and sort of annoyingly-outdated version. Presumably they've decided the slight embarrassment of using Microsoft's cloud services is worth having a modern version of Office.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoThey should contribute to LibreOffice and maybe Python instead.
- fbdab103 3y agoUnless LibreOffice can offer 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with Excel, you are going to be in a constant fight with your finance, accounting, tax, and modelling teams who know nothing else. I would expect shadow-IT to have a thriving black market of getting real Excel installed for the needy.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoThink bigger. Now imagine what could be done with a billion dollars not going to your direct competitor.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoLess than what they need.
- thih9 3y agoWhen it is going, they’re more dependent on your business, plus you’re no longer competitors, at least not in an area where they have a multi decade advantage.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoOffice software has been a commodity for a long time. Unless you have deliberately chosen to become dependent. Oh, and forgot to mention the licensing fees paid every year. So will be over a billion in a few short years.
- prmoustache 3y agoFinance + upper management can use what they want and the rest of the company something else. It is not like there is not a lot of interexchange and when it does happen, there is definitely never any macro involved.
- vietvu 3y agoMS Excels are every where. There is no exception.
- tmp000tmp 3y ago[flagged]
- somethoughts 3y agoIt always seemed like an obvious area of expansion for Amazon. Some sort of included email account that could be combined with your Amazon prime membership. Like every prime member gets 5 family members. Email is still pretty sticky. On the enterprise side they are already talking to a significant chunk of the total market for office productivity users. Instead they went and started a movie studio, were in talks to acquire physical movie theaters and acquired a retail medical group (OneMedical). Its a shame they didn't take it as seriously (i.e. smart acquisitions) when the number of players that could scale up such offerings is much smaller than the number of players that can make movies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fbdab103 3y agoI really like this idea. I would totally pay Amazon for email, and would not have many reservations recommending it to tech illiterate. If you are going to get in bed with BigTech, Amazon feels the least bad to me (but they are all horrible for different reasons).
- thih9 3y agoWhy does Amazon feel the least bad to you? Is there some deeper reason?
- stakhanov 3y agoWell, if the current choice is between Gmail and Outlook, it seems like bad mojo that all the operators of e-mail are also operators of advertising networks; they are the "attention brokers" of the world. Amazon has people pay them for infrastructure and has no line of busines that seems like a conflict of interests. (Online retailing doesn't seem like one, for example).
- abadpoli 3y agoAdvertising is one of Amazon’s largest and most profitable business units, fwiw. https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-the-most-powerful-advertising-machine-in-the-world-135753395.html https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/amazon-is-quietly-bui...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tiffanyh 3y agoMicrosoft should bill Amazon egress for every email sent.
- rickette 3y agohttps://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ anyone? Not an office suite but the email/calendar part looks covered.
- fomine3 3y agoIs there over 1M employees use Office product?
- sacnoradhq 3y agoFrom the comments as of writing, few read between the lines of this sloppy reporting: it's to standardize cloud-desktop apps for Amazon's internal use. Meta, for example, consolidated to Workplace + Google, away from Dropbox, Microsoft, Apple, and others. They use AWS and Azure for some 50k desktops on demand and a few servers, but it mostly deploys to its own metal because it's way, way cheaper than AWS in most use-cases.
- gundmc 3y agoI don't see anyone confused about this in the comments and am struggling to see how else it could be interpreted.
- AnonHP 3y ago> Microsoft is preparing to bring Amazon as a customer for its 365 cloud productivity tools in a deal worth over $1 billion, news site Insider reported on Tuesday, citing an internal document and a person familiar with the matter. > The e-commerce giant has committed the amount for over five years and to secure more than one million Microsoft 365 license seats, according to the report. What’s the scope of the deal beyond Microsoft 365 and how much does each license cost? The numbers, based on a back-of-the-envelope-calculation [1], make it seem like Amazon couldn’t negotiate better rates for such high volumes because its stuck with having to deal with Microsoft. [1]: 1 billion over five years is 200 million a year. With 1 million seats (keeping it at the lower bounds), it’s $200 per user per year, which is $16+ per user per month. Microsoft Business Premium is currently on sale for those who buy from its website at $19.8 per user per month (usually $22 a month).
- irjustin 3y agoYou can't escape excel. You can avoid Word, Powerpoint and every thing else... but Excel. Love it or hate it - it runs financing thus it runs the world.
- jahewson 3y agoDoes Amazon have 1m employees in finance?
- ygjb 3y agoexcel isn't just used by finance. I can use any number of command line tools, scripting languages, jupyter notebooks, etc, but sometimes is just faster to throw it in excel, do a little futzing around and send it over to the non-technical folks in a tool they know how to use.
- irjustin 3y agoNah there's no way they have that many in Finance, but they do have that many when you include 2-3 degrees of separation. Finance hands some calculation spreadsheet to someone else, who then rolls it up to a department head who then tells another analyst to modify what the previous guy did because head didn't like it and so and and so forth. The people most likely to never have to work with excel are IC engineers. If you're a manager, you likely have to do budgeting which goes to HR which goes to ... you guessed it - finance. And you have to remember you're in a business org. If you need to read an excel file once a year, you'll want a license because you're part of Amazon - I mean my god I have to go find a separate computer with an Office license?! No way, just give me a license.
- neilv 3y agoFor Amazon personnel as the users? I would've loved to read the 6-pager on that, because it's not immediately obvious to me. (I can see some business/data people demanding MS Excel, and some business people live by Powerpoint unless banned or forced to use some simpler and less-familiar presentation tool. But that's not a million seats. And letting MS get a toehold with their suite risks really dumbing-down how your organization works and thinks.)
- ernestoo 3y agoThis also means moving off Chime for video calls and moving to Teams. https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/
- HHC-Hunter 3y agoThe absolute hilarity.
- tacticus 3y agoSharepoint in a trench-coat is a terrible comms system
- olivermuty 3y agoTeams is a horrible software, but every single aws person I have talked to would love to use it instead of Chime. Not to mention that most of their most important (enterprise) customers are using it. It’s nice to be able to casually chat with a customer if you are in a customer facing role. Which is basically the entirety of the aws sales and solution engineering.
- abadpoli 3y agoI doubt it. I think this is a replacement for the existing on-prem Outlook, as well as replacing Quip and Workdocs which have been languishing for years. But I really doubt this replaces Slack/Chime for chat/video respectively.
- kotaKat 3y agoNo, it might be funnier than that. I know some folks that do management in one of the FCs and they had went from Chime to Slack earlier in the year so I can’t wait to see the sudden dump from Chime to Slack to Teams…
- rescbr 3y agoI had exactly one customer that used and loved Chime. For their use case, Chime was also cheaper than getting all their user base on O365. I also did not dislike Chime when I worked at AWS. Turns out that I have never updated my Chime client from version 4. After I left, I got into a call with somebody at AWS and hoooo boy, what piece of crap the new client is. The funny thing was people complaining about Chime's call quality and praising Slack's. It's exactly the same thing, Slack video call is a Chime SDK implementation.
- gustavus 3y agoThe interesting angle I am now considering is does there need to be an anti-trust case brought against MS to force them to separate Office from the rest of the company?
- nullindividual 3y agoThis would be interesting as their Office client and servers share code bases.
- xinayder 3y agoI'm just amazed at how they can market and sell their products that don't even work as they should. Every day at my company we have so many issues with Teams, it makes me wonder if wr're paying millions for an indie software.
- belter 3y agoGive $1B to evil empire or 100 million to make LibreOffice an even better alternative...Inquisitive minds what to know why not...
- snicker7 3y ago$1B? Imagine if even 1% of that went into LibreOffice funding.