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.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I compare AWS and Microsoft in the context of the modern cloud and what customers are looking for.
Highlights
00:04 — Two of the greatest growth companies in the Cloud Wars over the last 10 or 15 years have been Microsoft and AWS. Today, I want to highlight why it’s important to recognize Microsoft as the undisputedly largest, most influential, and one of the fastest-growing cloud vendors in the world, clearly taking the number one spot by any measure from AWS.
01:10 — The modern cloud of today is very different from what it was in AWS’s heyday when it created the category of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and became the leader. So, kudos to AWS for that, but the cloud is now much more. And now the cloud is being defined by customers — what they want, need, and expect.
01:48 — Some people might say Windows, Office, or Teams aren’t really cloud — this might be true in the eyes of Silicon Valley but not in the eyes of customers. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made a recent comment on Amazon’s last earnings call implying that Microsoft isn’t really a cloud provider because it’s not almost overwhelmingly infrastructure as AWS is.
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02:37 — He said that from one quarter to the next, AWS’s revenue went up $1.1 billion, which is “more than any other cloud provider.” The problem is in that same three-month period, Microsoft Cloud revenue went up $1.9 billion. For Q4, Microsoft Cloud revenue is $33.7 billion and AWS is $24.2 billion. So, in the most recent quarter, the same period for both companies, Microsoft Cloud revenue is 39% higher than that of AWS.
04:25 — Microsoft is bigger. It has a wider-ranging product base. It’s doing much more on the software side where customers can gain a lot of differentiation and business value. It’s important to bring this up in light of Jassy’s contention that somehow Microsoft doesn’t exist or isn’t truly a cloud provider. That’s ridiculous.
