To me this seems like xCloud is in response to Stadia. Google has the infrastructure and Microsoft and Sony need to work together to compete. This would be similar to how Microsoft and Sony responded to the Nintendo Wii.
While I agree Microsoft is going to be a major and probably the biggest competitor to Stadia, I don't think number or size of data centers makes any difference here. Microsoft has traditionally not been a "cloud" company while as Google has lived it's entire life as one. Google definitely has an advantage here given it's technically their turf. Not saying MS are incapable of delivering cloud workloads but Google definitely is considered the better of the two when it coming to cloud infrastructure and talent. This might be changing now rapidly though.
What are you talking about? Microsoft has Azure and before they had that, they had numerous Internet scale services like hotmail. Microsoft has vast experience with building and running internet scale applications. Just like Google has.
It's one thing building Azure in response to AWS and GCP and another thing innovating to support something like Google search for decades and then using the same knowledge and tech to build other cloud services. Of course Microsoft is totally capable of delivery cloud workloads but they can still be considered the underdog here when it comes to Google vs MS
I'd say MS is pretty well positioned to compete against Google: they have the infrastructure plus an actual good catalogue of games. Sony may not have the infrastructure on their own, but by partnering with Microsoft, they'll become a solid competitor too since they have an excellent games catalogue.
Google are the ones who will have to prove themselves here, IMO.
From what I understand, Sony and MS are literally throwing xbox's/ps4 hardware into racks and streaming from them. Doesn't seem very scalable or cost effective.
Google built their game platform from the ground up for the cloud, including specialized graphics hardware. Sounds like it will be able to scale up to meet demands of games, while the other services are just renting a console-in-a-datacenter to the user.
From a full-system integration might not be cost ineffective:
1. Single SKU for Server & Client (volume reduces cost)
2. Games target & optimize for this hardware already (nothing new)
3. Microsoft & Sony are essentially *the* targets (no platform integration cost)
4. Proven user adoption (approximate ROI known for these projects)
5. Brand recognition (xbox and playstation are household names)
6. Price (Microsoft is doing subscription for service + catalog)
7. Bought publishers (Microsoft & Sony "own" many dev shops)
8. Primary library vendor (DX11)
9. Network Effect (I bought an xbox because all of my friends owned one)
The only new components Microsoft needs:
1. Mount Game (iSCSI)
2. Output (HDMI to RTMP transcode)
3. Input
I'm not saying either solution is better (I prefer Google's approach) but they're only doing it if they've run the numbers.
Microsoft certainly isn't just filling server racks with Consumer model Xbox Ones, if that is what you have pictured. They have rack-mount servers that share the Xbox Architecture.
The Xbox One and PS4 are modified PC architectures with slightly specialized graphics hardware. All three are doing the exact same thing: building traditional server racks, just with with an added focus on GPU power/performance. Google doesn't have a leg up in their datacenters, and if anything has the detriment that both Microsoft and Sony can run Consumer-targeted software builds directly on their racks, whereas supposedly Stadia needs new game builds, customized to the new hardware.
> Azure has more DC and compute power around the world than Google
Interesting. Do you have a source for this?
Last I heard, Google's products are responsible for a significant proportion of all internet traffic e.g. in 2013 - 6 years ago - Forbes reported that it was 40% [1]. I think I heard more recently it was getting close to 50+% now but I cannot find any sources.
I'd be surprised to learn that MS is handling more traffic than Google and so has more DCs and more compute... or are they pissing money up the wall and just building data centres that are sitting 99% idle purely for bragging rights?
You're confusing Google's main services vs GCP and Azure. Stradia will be running on GCP, xCloud will be running on Azure. Azure has more data centers than GCP by a large amount.
Where did you read that Stadia will be in GCP only? From the looks of it, they are sharing a lot of infrastructure with YouTube which implies otherwise.
The problem is that Microsoft can't really be taken seriously in the gaming market, or in any consumer space where they might have good or great products but little to zero traction, and Sony doesn't have the network infrastructure.
