AWS on track to be bigger than IBM by Christmas

In my experience - Azure is the alternative when it's primarily a Windows-based shop. A lot of legacy applications typically run on Azure since companies do "lift-and-shift".

There was a sort of "golden age" for cloud in I'd say 2016-2019 where elastic compute was merged with traditional IT and Admin skillsets to create flexible fleets of servers and wrangle them all with Chef/Puppet, Ansible, or Terraform.

Now I feel like the pendulum has swung waaay too far. And I say this as an engineer who once worked for AWS. Of course you can still use EC2/ECS to do this sort of setup, but it seems everyone is oh so eager to throw everything onto Lambda and Fargate and completely abstract away the machine to the point where you have no insight or control as to what is running your application. It's absolute madness - it's like when my mother was programming on mainframes in the 70s/80s except instead of a batch of punch cards it's zipped files of python and js

At this point I find even running your own Kubernetes cluster to be more palatable than serverless solutions. With that at least you can still have some control into what's going on.

I would say it's a close call between MS and AWS in terms of who is the new IBM.

I see them both equally safe in terms of "won't get fired" at this point, although Azure maybe was risky as recent as 3 years ago, they seem stable now.

MS seems to have more of that super sticky engagement with customers that IBM had. Our MS tech teams seem unable to use technology from another vendor. Those on AWS like it and prefer it since it's familiar, but seem more adept at leveraging other technology commercial or open source. That super lock in MS has seems very IBM like to me?

It's a close race for sure.

Maybe they are both IBM, at different points in IBM's history?

I don't think this exactly the same. The "no one got fired for choosing IBM" was a derogatory statement. It wasn't uncommon that you got some significant discount for related products and so businesses would have a blanket policy that if IBM provided a solution you were required use it _even if you knew the solution was worse or wouldn't work._ Doesn't work? You're not going to get fired because you "had no choice."

You can argue with price or the peculiarities of a service or that AWS is taking over the world, but I have never seen them use contracts to force effectively companies to comply.

If I am not mistaken they compare AWS (cloud services) with the entire IBM company (cloud services, consultancing business, …).

Which would make it a strange comparison (but ok, it would just emphasize the size of AWS)

They're comparing AWS revenue to all IBM revenue. IBM is engaged in a number of other areas including fabless semiconductor design.

but have you heard of Kyndryl? :) IBM is like dark cloud market nowadays. No one has any idea what it does but it still makes money somehow

IBM owns Red Hat, you ever heard of those guys?

IBM largely makes their money supporting legacy software, doing services and consulting work, and through Red Hat's software offerings

Note that AWS has around 25k employees while IBM is close to 350k.

IBM has grown to do a lot more than just computing services. Which is part of the reason why IBM has been struggling to find its way. In this article they’re talking about all IBM revenue, not just computing.

I thought IBM had divested their service part recently, not sure how did that affected their size.

I live in a town with a sizeable IBM office. The number of tendrils coming out of it is crazy. To the point where everyone knows someone who is employed by IBM.

I wouldn't say it's only megacorps.

Universities have internship courses with IBM, and IBM have both normal and research contracts with the universities. Even tiny universities with less than a hundred students.

All the banks have contracts with IBM. All of them. There are hardware contracts, software contracts, and customised development versions of both of those for the banks.

Most of the schools also have IBM contracts. Not generally customised development, just deployment of prebuilt hardware and preconfigured software. Even the kindergartens do.

All the ISPs have support contracts. They tend to be more secretive about what the contracts are, but from what I hear it's mostly prebuilt hardware and very slightly customised software, and the support contracts are where IBM make the most of the income from the various contracts with the ISPs.

All the hospitals have contracts. Customised hardware contracts, but boring and preconfigured software. However, the support contracts are fairly busy and IBM have a really high turnover in the teams that support the hospitals.

The government buildings, of which we have local, state and federal, all have IBM hardware in them. Some of which has been under active support for three decades. Software wise, though, the government is edging away from IBM due to some recent fuckups that have seen IBM blacklisted for new contracts.