Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I call out AWS’s slowdown in both innovation and momentum, as the rest of the hyperscalers redefine the future of cloud.
Highlights
00:15 — Now it’s been interesting here as we watch the four hyperscalers recently, Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle. We hear that cliche about a rising tide lifts all boats. And I would say that AWS is definitely the one of the four hyperscalers that is rising less slowly, less quickly, and to not as great a height.
01:08 — AWS is the company that created the cloud infrastructure business, and for most of those 19 years, AWS deserved to be called the King of the Cloud. But a few years ago, Microsoft’s cloud, Azure, became, you know, quite prominent. Google Cloud started to innovate wildly. Oracle has been on fire. AWS lost the role, the opportunity, the swagger of being the leader
02:16 — It is now the follower. AWS is not the innovator, either in technology or in go-to-market ways, and these financial results prove that they certainly had a very nice Q3. You can’t just bring metrics or comparative performance from other industries and apply it to the Cloud Wars. Those numbers that AWS put up were just not anywhere close to as good as those of its competitors.
03:36 — So, in either of those cases, AWS is being dramatically outgrown by the other three hyperscalers. There’s just no way around it, and in a detailed article that I’ll have on cloudwars.com later today, I lay that out both for the quarterly numbers and the latest RPO and backlog figures.
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04:23 — And in the AI Revolution, these four companies are in large part helping the entire global economy to establish, “How am I going to move forward? What am I going to need to do?” The other three have all stolen the jump on AWS and become much more dynamic, and that’s revealed in the customer demand, expressed as quarterly revenue and also going forward as RPO or backlog.
05:28 — What we’re seeing here is the fact that this, this notion of innovation, of, you know, relentless performance, relentless excellence, relentless progress. It can be brutal at times. And while AWS is a big, successful company, is going to be around for a long time, the numbers are showing it is no longer anywhere close to the leader.
