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> 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 Tuesd

by 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 ago
You 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 ago
  Does Amazon have 1m employees in finance?
  - ygjb 3y ago
    excel 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 ago
    Nah 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.
    - SargeDebian 3y ago
      All of Amazon has ~1.5M employees. That includes everyone picking orders, and doing any kind of logistics and delivery. I really don't think they have about 1M employees who regularly exchange financial spreadsheets.
      - filoleg 3y ago
        Office isn’t just for spreadsheets. Office is the whole shebang, including Outlook, Active Directory, Teams, etc. If your company uses Office, then your employees typically have their employee accounts managed through Active Directory. Which means that every single employee gets their own licensed Office seat, even if they don’t touch anything in the Office beyond email and Teams.
        SargeDebian 3y ago
        A: you don't nee a licensed office seat to be a user in AD B: For warehouse operations, not everyone needs to be a user in AD C: The comment above said there are a million employees with 2-3 degrees of separation to finance in terms of exchanging spreadsheets, which is what I responded to.
        filoleg 3y ago
        > For warehouse operations, not everyone needs to be a user in AD Do you agree that every employee needs work email access and some sort of a user account (for managing their benefits, interacting with payroll systems, etc.)? If yes, then sure, it can be technically accomplished without AD. However, AD is an extremely well-suited system for managing incredibly large swaths of work accounts. And what’s the other option, running two separate user account management systems in parallel? That’s an insane amount of overhead managing and making sure it actually works. On Amazon scale, it would be a ton of money spent with very questionable results. Things aren’t that simple, and AD is an extremely powerful tool that can handle quite a lot of really quirky and intense scenarios. > there are a million employees with 2-3 degrees of separation to finance in terms of exchanging spreadsheets Finance employees are far from the only ones needing tools like spreadsheets/powerpoint/etc. What do you think devs use for writing and sharing design docs? What about presentations (which are used by pretty much everyone working in the corporate)? What about email? Do you think warehousing doesn’t use those at all? Office is just straight up a good overall deal. You pay for a seat and you get all the Office tools (word/excel/etc), Teams, AD, Outlook, Onedrive/Sharepoint, etc. If your user touches even one of those, it makes sense to just say screw it and get a license seat for everyone, even from just the overhead costs perspective. I am not saying that MS Office is the end-all. My current place uses Google offerings instead, but the general idea is the same.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  Microsoft should be split up and Excel should be it's own company.
  - Pungsnigel 3y ago
    No, it really shouldn't.
    - mcny 3y ago
      I think it makes sense to think excel is sustainable on its own. Also I've heard there are people in the US military who pretty much make PowerPoint slide decks all day. I'd still package all of office together. Maybe not excel on its own but I imagine office is already its own org inside Microsoft.
      - redog 3y ago
        live.com vs microsoftonline.com
      - filoleg 3y ago
        > Maybe not excel on its own but I imagine office is already its own org inside Microsoft. You are correct, it has been its own org for a long time. I don’t see the decoupling from the rest of MSFT ever happening though. Working with some of the Office codebase and some adjacent ones years ago, it is so tightly coupled on a technical level to many other MSFT products, it is pretty much impossible to separate. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that there is some level of Xbox code integration within Office, and I am only halfway joking here. AD integration alone is so fundamental, without it the whole product starts falling apart. Hell, some of the code in SharePoint has hard dependencies on rather ancient Skype/Lync code, and some pieces of core functionality code are still hanging onto files that were last touched 10+ years ago. It was kind of a bittersweet feeling to have to edit a piece of code and reading comments, and then realizing that the most recent changes to it were submitted by your manager around a decade ago, back when they were just starting out their career as a software dev. And let’s not even talk about Teams, which has its fangs set extremely deep all over Office products (and beyond).
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  All joking aside, this the user count is probably being driven more by email and possibly Teams than Excel. I would guess that most of the licenses are for what Microsoft calls "frontline workers"[0]. It is also highly likely [1] that this is a very, very, bespoke deal and the user count is just an easy pricing model to use that the Amazon people can wrap their heads around and that Microsoft can recognize revenue from. 0 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/frontline?rtc=1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/fro... 1 - source: I used to be involved in crafting and negotiating these sorts of deals, although a bit smaller ($100m-ish vs $1b) and I've never done business with Amazon or Microsoft.
- glimshe 3y ago
  Excel is one of the wonders of the world in usefulness. Pretty much anything a computer can do can be done in Excel.
politelemon 3y ago
1 million seats though? Who are they buying so many licenses for? Surely Amazon only has thousands of employees and even with turnover rates it wouldn't reach 1 million. Am I misunderstanding seats
- PorterBHall 3y ago
  I’m guessing some of those seats are resold by Amazon as virtual machines on AWS.
- ygjb 3y ago
  https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...
- PrayagBhakar 3y ago
  Alternative link that didn’t take me to a paywall :: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/amzn/employees/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/amzn/employees/ But yea Amazon has a lot of employees. Idk what the tech/business/distribution center split is but I’m sure everyone is given at least a work email.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  The driving/deliveries are not yet performed by robots.

by AnonHP 3y ago

irjustin 3y ago

You 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 ago
Does Amazon have 1m employees in finance?
- ygjb 3y ago
  excel 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 ago
  Nah 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.
  - SargeDebian 3y ago
    All of Amazon has ~1.5M employees. That includes everyone picking orders, and doing any kind of logistics and delivery. I really don't think they have about 1M employees who regularly exchange financial spreadsheets.
    - filoleg 3y ago
      Office isn’t just for spreadsheets. Office is the whole shebang, including Outlook, Active Directory, Teams, etc. If your company uses Office, then your employees typically have their employee accounts managed through Active Directory. Which means that every single employee gets their own licensed Office seat, even if they don’t touch anything in the Office beyond email and Teams.
      - SargeDebian 3y ago
        A: you don't nee a licensed office seat to be a user in AD B: For warehouse operations, not everyone needs to be a user in AD C: The comment above said there are a million employees with 2-3 degrees of separation to finance in terms of exchanging spreadsheets, which is what I responded to.
        filoleg 3y ago
        > For warehouse operations, not everyone needs to be a user in AD Do you agree that every employee needs work email access and some sort of a user account (for managing their benefits, interacting with payroll systems, etc.)? If yes, then sure, it can be technically accomplished without AD. However, AD is an extremely well-suited system for managing incredibly large swaths of work accounts. And what’s the other option, running two separate user account management systems in parallel? That’s an insane amount of overhead managing and making sure it actually works. On Amazon scale, it would be a ton of money spent with very questionable results. Things aren’t that simple, and AD is an extremely powerful tool that can handle quite a lot of really quirky and intense scenarios. > there are a million employees with 2-3 degrees of separation to finance in terms of exchanging spreadsheets Finance employees are far from the only ones needing tools like spreadsheets/powerpoint/etc. What do you think devs use for writing and sharing design docs? What about presentations (which are used by pretty much everyone working in the corporate)? What about email? Do you think warehousing doesn’t use those at all? Office is just straight up a good overall deal. You pay for a seat and you get all the Office tools (word/excel/etc), Teams, AD, Outlook, Onedrive/Sharepoint, etc. If your user touches even one of those, it makes sense to just say screw it and get a license seat for everyone, even from just the overhead costs perspective. I am not saying that MS Office is the end-all. My current place uses Google offerings instead, but the general idea is the same.
donmcronald 3y ago
Microsoft should be split up and Excel should be it's own company.
- Pungsnigel 3y ago
  No, it really shouldn't.
  - mcny 3y ago
    I think it makes sense to think excel is sustainable on its own. Also I've heard there are people in the US military who pretty much make PowerPoint slide decks all day. I'd still package all of office together. Maybe not excel on its own but I imagine office is already its own org inside Microsoft.
    - redog 3y ago
      live.com vs microsoftonline.com
    - filoleg 3y ago
      > Maybe not excel on its own but I imagine office is already its own org inside Microsoft. You are correct, it has been its own org for a long time. I don’t see the decoupling from the rest of MSFT ever happening though. Working with some of the Office codebase and some adjacent ones years ago, it is so tightly coupled on a technical level to many other MSFT products, it is pretty much impossible to separate. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that there is some level of Xbox code integration within Office, and I am only halfway joking here. AD integration alone is so fundamental, without it the whole product starts falling apart. Hell, some of the code in SharePoint has hard dependencies on rather ancient Skype/Lync code, and some pieces of core functionality code are still hanging onto files that were last touched 10+ years ago. It was kind of a bittersweet feeling to have to edit a piece of code and reading comments, and then realizing that the most recent changes to it were submitted by your manager around a decade ago, back when they were just starting out their career as a software dev. And let’s not even talk about Teams, which has its fangs set extremely deep all over Office products (and beyond).
marcus0x62 3y ago
All joking aside, this the user count is probably being driven more by email and possibly Teams than Excel. I would guess that most of the licenses are for what Microsoft calls "frontline workers"[0]. It is also highly likely [1] that this is a very, very, bespoke deal and the user count is just an easy pricing model to use that the Amazon people can wrap their heads around and that Microsoft can recognize revenue from. 0 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/frontline?rtc=1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/fro... 1 - source: I used to be involved in crafting and negotiating these sorts of deals, although a bit smaller ($100m-ish vs $1b) and I've never done business with Amazon or Microsoft.
glimshe 3y ago
Excel is one of the wonders of the world in usefulness. Pretty much anything a computer can do can be done in Excel.

politelemon 3y ago

1 million seats though? Who are they buying so many licenses for? Surely Amazon only has thousands of employees and even with turnover rates it wouldn't reach 1 million. Am I misunderstanding seats

PorterBHall 3y ago
I’m guessing some of those seats are resold by Amazon as virtual machines on AWS.
ygjb 3y ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...
PrayagBhakar 3y ago
Alternative link that didn’t take me to a paywall :: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/amzn/employees/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/amzn/employees/ But yea Amazon has a lot of employees. Idk what the tech/business/distribution center split is but I’m sure everyone is given at least a work email.
hotpotamus 3y ago
The driving/deliveries are not yet performed by robots.