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Comment by Moissanite | Hacker News Reader

AWS and Azure should both be separated from their parent companies. That would end a lot of the hand-wringing about Amazon competing with its retail customers, and would force Microsoft to stop it's anticompetitive license bundling shenanigans.

GCP can follow in a few years, if they survive that long.

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It's unclear if the accounting Microsoft is using to account for Azure is actually valid. Apparently a lot of Office revenue is being stuffed under the Azure division to inflate its numbers to make them look bigger than Google.

does google not do the same with their office products?

My assumption would be the revenue from Microsofts office products to be at least an order of magnitude larger than Google's

Just my assumption however

They do, but they only started doing that after Microsoft did it.

To be fair to Google, they have a lot less experience with managing Wall Street through tactical use of accounting standards.

True… and in practice how do you do anything without Azure AD? If all the juicy stuff is stored in 365 and therefore warrants P2 or E5 bundling, is it possible to unscramble the revenue egg?

If they can tease identity out, the rest gets easier.

I agree. And while I'm probably wrong, my impression is that so much of the parts of identity AD handles directly is simple these days. What's difficult is IT departments are used to AD.

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1zjf2a/windows_ad...

That's nine years old so I'm not sure what your point is.

I think that's something slightly different. I'm not saying AD would be easy to replace in an existing org, with existing software. I'm saying the job it does for most orgs seems fairly basic (i.e. be the system of record for users and groups, which map on to OIDC users/groups in individual apps for all the day to day permissions work).

Companies are free to split up their reporting into as many arbitrary divisions and categories as they like. IBM has been playing this game for a while, putting all kinds of legacy business and whatever division they have left that is growing under a "Cloud" banner to show their strong "Cloud first transformation".

Azure is indeed substantially smaller than AWS, and hides it with 365 revenue. The estimates I've seen suggest that in terms of true cloud infrastructure, the next 3 providers combined are still not quite as big as AWS.

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