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Comment by gordon_freeman | Hacker News Reader

I think Microsoft also adds their Office 365 subscription revenue in their cloud revenue and AWS doesn't. So it's not apples to apples comparison imo.

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That's kinda the point. AWS can't count their Office 365 subscriptions, because it doesn't have any. It's a question of where on draws lines. Neither is an apples-to-apples comparison.

Microsoft's moat play is to integrate with Office, Teams, github, and similar. If Azure integrates into my business processes, that's huge. And if github has a pipeline straight into cloud deployment with one click, that's huge too.

AWS' moat play might be to integrate with business logistics. Amazon has business services like fulfillment which could be part of AWS. It's a deeper moat, but not as wide. No one can compete with Amazon here without dropping billions, but many businesses don't need those services (mine doesn't).

Google Workspace has a better UX than Office 365, but is not at all enterprise-ready, and is barely b2b-ready. That doesn't look likely to change soon. Google might be able to build up some kind of moat around advertising integration, in both directions, but it seems harder.

For branding, right now:

* AWS > Microsoft > Google among developers.

* Microsoft > AWS > Google among non-tech businesses.

Microsoft also has existing business relationships with practically every business that uses computers on the planet. They are the king of enterprise.

I'm just speculating here but let's say Stadia becomes a big cloud gaming business for Google then that gives the velocity to Google Cloud biz similar to how Office 365 has done it for Microsoft in the cloud space. Google workspace alone can't compete with Microsoft in cloud revenue so Google needs something else in front end service on top of its cloud infra to compete with Amazon and Microsoft.

And 365 includes Office. So this is basically the revenue from Office, which was already a huge business long before cloud was a thing.

And they do aggressive bundling to tie it together.. Basically the same monopolistic practices which got them in trouble back in the 90s.

so were many other products before they become a PaaS.

AWS has WorkMail and a bunch of other services having to do with office workers (virtualized windows instances and such I reckon?), but I doubt they're anywhere as big as Office's offering.

People use WorkMail?

For some reason, I do.

How ridiculous.

I've never heard of cloudwars.co before this post. I will henceforth assume that they are unreliable clickbait and possibly in the tank for Microsoft.

If Google includes G-Suite (does it? I don't know!) then MS including Office 365 is fair.

It's not about "fair", it's about whether the products are comparable. Amazon simply doesn't offer online document software a-la Office or G-Suite. (Likewise Microsoft and Google don't offer equivalents to some of esoterica you can find in the AWS menagerie). If you want to do an analysis about who is beating who, you need to compare competing products.

https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs

You're right, I forgot that existed. Which is sort of the point: Office 365 is annihilating WorkDocs in the market, and that's important to note if you're doing a competetive analysis of the online office productivity market.

But that fact isn't really relevant to a discussion about whether AWS or Azure is capturing more of the cloud hosting market, which is what the headline implies.

Wow, never heard of it - and will it be around in 10+ years time? Has it reached critical-mass to ensure continuity and availability?

+1. Even if it did, in one case (aws), the product’s success is entirely dependent on success of other companies (for better or worse) and the multiples/margins are also different.

Yeah that and if Google should include Android ("App distribution as a Service") and YouTube ("Video as a Service") then they'd probably cover a lot of the gap on both Amazon and Microsoft.

I also wonder if AWS accounts for revenue from Amazon, the retailer and the digital services provider? If so, Alphabet's "use" of GCP to power search and ads must make them the largest GCP customer and help their revenue numbers significantly. I guess, Alphabet's waiting for the most opportune time to merge those numbers in their reports to blow AWS out of the water, just for PR purposes.

Besides, I think AWS missed a trick by passing on GitHub (and instead relying on CodeDeploy/CodeCommit and half-baked other horrendous, me-too offerings). I mean, they have acquired developer tools companies before (like Cloud9 IDE). May be they'd do well to all-in for new-age dev-tools companies like repl.it and retool.com now that they don't have a run away success in a GitHub-like product which really is at the center of the software development world right now.

Also Dynamics which is their CRM/ERP platform. Not sure how big a factor that is, but it's at least a decent chunk of revenue.

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