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Comment by bradhe | Hacker News Reader

There is absolutely, positively, certifiably no way this is even close to true. Did the people are bloomberg even look at Microsoft's figures, or were they too busy counting the cash MS sent over?

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It seems pretty reasonable to me. If Msft makes $1 billion on 20% of the market, and Amzn makes $3.8 billion (high-end analyst estimate) with 71% of the market, the math roughly matches.

I think those market share numbers are suspicious.. according to rackspace they had 1.3b in sales of private cloud and public cloud services in 2012: http://ir.rackspace.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=221673&p=irol-ne...

So either the total is more than 100% market share for the 3, or those numbers or wrong.

Edit: added "in 2012" for rackspace financials

I'd agree, most of these numbers are "fuzzy" and based on analyst estimates; I'd almost be more surprised if they DID perfectly add up to 100%. :-)

The percentages aren't market share rather percentages of companies using the product. That is a company which uses both Azure and AWS could contribute towards both percentages.

I think you underestimate the penalties for lying about something like this in a publicly traded company, false statements about sales is securities fraud.

It's true if you bend the rules a bit... Read the article and you'll notice this gem:

> Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview

That is a really vague statement that could mean all sorts of things (Office 365, Windows Server licensees, etc).

You massively underestimate enterprise/corporate use.

And especially how a good sales team can inflate revenues in that market...

You do know that Microsoft is dominant in Enterprise and that that is where most IT dollars are spent.

The more surprising thing to me is that Microsoft isn't burying Amazon. But give them 2 years.

It's clearly a puff piece. Having said that, there are a lot of MS server customers and I can imagine Azure being a compelling option if you don't want to do a rewrite.

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