Oof. Curious to see Microsoft and Apple. I guess if you’re a Google investor you’ll be happy with cloud continuing to grow. Profitability is inevitable.
Cloud computing profit is largely driven by companies that don't make profit themselves.
If we end up with a major tech crunch, which I suspect we will, and a bunch of these big, non-profitable new tech startups/IPOs start to fold, we'll see a massive and rapid contraction in the cloud space.
The last 3 companies I worked at invested very heavily in cloud infrastructure but none of them has made a profit. There's a pretty good chance if you're on HN the same is true for your company.
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Unless the rise of many viable competitors drives cloud computing down to a commodity service with razor thin margins.
There's no guarantee that the AWS gravy chain is going to materialize for other companies.
From what I can tell it's a cat and mouse game of who can lock-in and who can abstract away, and I assume it's been going on for longer than I've been at this.
Google has been at this for a decade and is only now at the cusp of profitability.
With a barrier to entry this high, and vendor lock-in so strong, you can be sure all big 3 cloud services are going to be minting money for many years to come.
My impression was that those were geared towards firms who have already bought heavily into the Oracle/IBM consulting/licensing.
They're not clouds where Netflix or Spotify are going to spin up a few thousand servers. Unless I've been misinformed?
So they don't really seem to be in the same category. I mean is anyone not already in the IBM ecosystem ever choosing between AWS and IBM?
You could say the same about Azure. I see a lot of click-next-collect-cheque being done in Azure, only with a browser instead of a desktop wizard.