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Comment by smiljo | Hacker News Reader

It's actually a great testament to Microsoft's execution that they were able to catch up (to some extent at least), despite AWS having a seven year head start.

Bezos himself called this a business miracle (the seven year head start, that is): https://youtu.be/f3NBQcAqyu4?t=2133

And this is against Amazon, which is known for execution. I suppose we're in for a fun couple of years, especially with the JEDI contract soap opera and all that.

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Microsoft's great advantage is enterprise bundling. Not only do they already have sales relationships with every big IT shop in the world - they're selling both software and cloud (which means they can discount one or the other).

To Microsoft's credit they maximized this advantage very well.

Id argue Microsofts strong suit here is making themselves look competitive. During the web server wars Apache reigned supreme, until the numbers shifted in favour of IIS which overtook Apache for a time. Was this a better product Apache was fending off? no. Microsoft had paid hosting providers to park web domains and registrations on IIS servers so Netcraft would finger them as #1.

now we have Azure and its the same thing all over again. Azure Cloud has lots of tenancy, but these numbers I suspect are bogus. Azure runs Office 365, Exchange, Bing, and Xbox Live assets as well, and these are all "tenants." MS also bundles discounts for business critical things like desktop and server licenses into accepting Azure credits, so its likely many of these tenants are on paper only.

The exec who was proudly in charge of those IIS shenanigans is now in charge of Azure (Guthrie).

My recollection is that IIS marketshare started falling when domain parking became a thing. Particularly once the registrars got involved.

IIS was always a good web server. Classic ASP had unique ways of shooting yourself in the foot... but so does everything else. And in those olden days a retail box of NT Server barely cost more than a Stronghold license.

I don't think we can tell for sure before they start releasing numbers for cloud proper. Both Azure and GCP are problematic in that regard (see the acrobatics that Stratechery was going through while trying to deduce GCP numbers).

That being said, they've been closing the feature gap, and have shown themselves able to pick up large contracts (controversy over JEDI notwitstanding), so the market certainly seems more competitive than a couple of years ago.

As for factoring discounts etc. into cloud numbers, I confess that I don't have a good answer.

Azure doesn't run O365, Exchange, Bing, or Xbox Live. Please stop spreading misinformation. (I work at MS.)

O365 workloads are distributed across a number of environments. While Exchange mostly lives one its own hardware, SPO is very distributed now - it still has its own hardware, but also has a lot of data and services that run in Azure. And O365 is very dependent on AAD.

This is all true, but it’s a far cry from OP’s statement

They hated him, because he said the truth. Azure also does not run sharepoint, teams, and it didn't run skype.

It doesn't run or host any part of those?

> Azure runs Office 365, Exchange, Bing, and Xbox Live assets as well

I didn't take "runs [...] assets" to mean runs the entire thing.

Bits and bobs run on top of pure azure, and some infra is definitely shared, but anything cloudy that came up around the same time as or before azure (like Bing and o365) used and for the most part still uses their own data centers and deployment tech.

A brave Microsoft guy who calls out bullshit like it should be. Respect and good luck

>great testament to Microsoft's execution that they were able to catch up

looking at the history i'd say it is in MS DNA to be the successful second. In many instances they overtook the first.

Great observation, with a very minor caveat: when Gates & Allen started out in programming languages, they were an awesome first mover. I highly recommend the "Hard Drive" book which goes into a bit more detail.

However, in everything after that very first stage they were an amazing second mover: DOS, Word, Excel, etc. And now Azure.

And most famously: Windows

I think Microsoft leveraged their Office lock-in, additionally to luring some users with apps like one-note/one-drive.

I use Azure outside the US from central Europe and the performance of their cloud services is just terrible.

Personally, I don't really like the move to the cloud at all. The whole MS palette of services from the OS to Office doesn't really convince me.

I am surprised the cloud market is actually that small. Especially since classic hosting is just included. And a growth of ~250% compared to last decade? A decade is pretty long...

Our business "jumped" into the cloud because of the reliance on MS office products. It was not done out of love.

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