My guess is that it's more along the lines of GCP being expected to be profitable. They're a distant #3, possibly #4 in the market so it seems unlikely that they're trying to exploit market position when that'll just give customers another reason to switch to AWS.
https://canalys.com/newsroom/global-cloud-services-Q1-2022 has it has AWS at 33%, Azure at 21%, and GCP at 8%. Oracle and AliCloud are the two I'd expect to try for that #3 spot, especially since that could be a single acquisition if e.g. IBM is interested in selling.
The potential confound here is how you measure it, of course: Microsoft gets a big jump from all of the people using Office 365, Google has G-Suite, etc. but I don't think there's any world in which Google has enough leverage to increase pricing if they don't have to.
G-Suite is not a Microsoft 365 competitor. Only businesses with limited needs seem to use G-Suite, and theu supplement it with Microsoft software a fair bit to make using G-Suite palatable.
I say this as a wholly anti-Microsoft person. Even Nextcloud is doing better at delivering features to small and medium businesses than G-Suite.
You might not consider it a competitor but plenty of places do. My point was simply that it’s a separate class of product which is often bundled which makes market share numbers harder to compare.
I have to keep saying this because somehow this myth just will not die: Microsoft does not report O365 revenue as Azure revenue. They broke those out separately many, many years ago.
They appear to define “Intelligent Cloud” like this:
> • Server products and cloud services, including Azure and other cloud services; SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (“CALs”); and Nuance and GitHub.
> • Enterprise Services, including Enterprise Support Services, Microsoft Consulting Services, and Nuance professional services
Doesn’t like Xbox subscriptions and other unrelated malarkey factor into azure too? If you took out all the income statement stuffing I’ll bet you aws is in the 80% range.
GitHub, Teams, Office 365. Compare that to Google Chat, Google Docs and nothing for code sharing, plus Microsoft has every darn Managed Service Provider and IT guy shoving their product down businesses throats.
Google has an inferior product with no sales infrastructure, its impressive they have gotten as many clients as they currently have.
