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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s puzzling remarks about cloud providers.
Highlights
00:19 — Recently, AWS came out with a pretty solid Q4, and for the first time in almost two years, the growth rate increased. But in its quarterly earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made a bizarre comment where he seemed to be indicating that either Microsoft is not a cloud provider or that $1.9 billion is less than $1.1 billion.
01:27 — Jassy said, “in Q4, AWS added more than $1.1 billion of incremental quarter-over-quarter revenue, which on an FX- neutral basis is more than any other cloud provider, as far as we can tell.” For the same three months, Microsoft Cloud revenue went up by $1.9 billion. Either Jassy is saying that $1.9 billion is less than $1.1 billion, or he’s saying Microsoft isn’t a cloud provider.
02:15 — Now, I think there is a mindset issue: Jassy is trying to get the rest of us to believe that the cloud is still stuck 10 or 12-15 years ago when AWS was the dominant cloud infrastructure player, and it still is today. The difference is that customers want much more from the cloud than just infrastructure. They want applications, databases, GenAI services, and more.
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03:24 — Customers have been saying with their wallets for a long time that they want much more from the cloud. Satya Nadella of Microsoft says, “We, the Microsoft Cloud, can address every part of our customer’s digital estates; we can address their needs.” Google Cloud has come in very strong with much more software-oriented capability. Oracle’s come in with some very disruptive, unique cloud infrastructure abilities.
04:39 — I think it was an ill-advised statement for Jassy. Customers are really smart these days, and they are starting to dictate what they want from the cloud, rather than sitting back passively and allowing the cloud providers to say, “Hey, we’re going to make the rules. We’re going to set the terms. We’re going to tell you what you want need.” Those days are over.
