This is a Forbes "contributor" article, meaning it's got no more vetting by Forbes editors than my post here. Basically Forbes contributors are people who like making up clickbait.
I'm surprised he didn't include Apple's services revenues as "cloud computing" (after all, it includes iCloud!), so he could declare it the winner!
I haven't looked at the numbers released by Microsoft, but I'd bet that the MS numbers include software licensing revenue and since Amazon just provides infrastructure, they have no software revenue... So when you launch a SQL/Server instance in AWS, that's "cloud revenue" for Microsoft.
These are total BS numbers, speaking as someone in the business. IBM is guilty of a lot of financial engineering (far more than any of the technological sort) grouping a diverse pool of unrelated "income" as "cloud".
Cloudwashing is not the same as market share.
P.S. It wouldn't surprise me if the author/PR flack was/is retained by IBM.
I am an Azure user and love it, but these articles are comparing apples and oranges. Microsoft, IBM or Oracle include cloud software such as Office 365 or enterprise software such as their ERP systems. Amazon doesn't really even sell comparable software.
Have been using azure for last couple of years and am pretty impressed with the uptime as well the ease of use. The only drawback is that I never got to use aws and am one of the few developers who have no idea of aws and the stack
I think the article is potentially misleading. Just because a large number of traditional enterprise customers switched their on-prem exchange/office licenses for cloud licenses, doesn't mean that MS is leading the way. Cannibalising your own market is meaningless.
Last time MS tried not to cannibalize their own market, they failed to show up for the Internet in the 1990s Netscape/Google era. If they are cannibalizing their own market now, it means they have learned how to stay afloat as times change.
That's important, especially if you assume that Cloud is where future growth lies, and on-prem installed software/hardware is not.
In all this, "Revenue" is a silly word, since in the Cloud world, you've got comingled hardware rentals and software licensing, which have very different profit margins.
I agree, but trying to say that you're a market leader when really you've just exchanged tit for tat is highly misleading. Claiming that you are beating Amazon at cloud when all you've done is move exchange licenses to a hosted solution is hardly amazing.
"Cannibalising your own market is meaningless" --> No it isn't. Revenues are moving from one BU to another, with the latter forecast-ed to grow exponentially. It is an expected outcome of moving to the cloud.
> The narrative—and it is dead wrong—repeated relentlessly and tirelessly by many in the media and amplified by some analysts that Amazon is the runaway winner in the cloud is baseless, sloppy and terribly misleading
This appears to be an interesting comparison. Microsoft Cloud includes Office 365 subscriptions.. Which can have some 'cloud' components, but also gets installed on your PC. Likewise, I have never heard of someone running a startup out of salesforce.com, or Oracle.com. I would guess they are cloud based offerings of their software stacks.
I guess 'cloud' can be said about all of them, but as a tech, I would consider true 'cloud' to be full Infrastructure as a Service.. not just applications as a service.
Microsoft and this article try very hard to fuzz the meaning of "cloud computing" to make their numbers look prettier. If we start counting Office 365, than Gmail should also be counted, as is Amazon Prime related products (Cloud Drive, for example). Why stop there? Isn't the whole Google search on "the cloud"? Isn't the whole Amazon retail shopping on "the cloud"?
Counting only AWS and GCP against "Microsoft cloud" and salesforce is more financial marketing than anything else.
I'm surprised he didn't include Apple's services revenues as "cloud computing" (after all, it includes iCloud!), so he could declare it the winner!