I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too).
No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies.
MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Even when they did start competing (such as with the Surface line) it was done in a way that has not really hurt the partners and has probably helped them by raising the Windows brand in the premium space vis a vis a Mac.
You're mistaken if you think Microsoft doesn't compete directly with its partners.
If anything, they are very sneaky how they do it, every ISV knows and yet still collaborates with them.
SharePoint improvements have been built and incorporated out of the box because/thanks to ISV's, Flow (now PowerAutomate) is a direct inspiration and competition from one of MS historical partners in the SharePoint space called Nintex.
They absolutely compete, they absolutely steal ideas and they do so by getting their partners to willingly show them what they are working on.
For any ISV worth their salt in the MS world, they know this and hopefully they have a plan for when that ultimately happens.
The one thing that Microsoft keeps focusing on is IT related stuff, whether it's software or hardware, it's still in the IT realm 90% of the time.
On the other hand as you pointed out yourself, Amazon does everything and doesn't think twice to enter a new market if it thinks it can aggressively compete and gain a significant market share.
Similarly, both Amazon and Google do not have an engrained culture of working with partners the same way that Microsoft does, they do work with some don't get me wrong, but it's nowhere near what Microsoft does and how it behaves.
It's no surprise that the Co-Sell program at Microsoft is so successful, it's pushed by the Higher ups and all the way down to the field sales people live and breathe it.
Google is trying to do something similar but you can tell (if you work or have worked with both sides) that the google side doesn't care as much as Microsoft.
That's not what they mean, Amazon will compete with companies on non-technical grounds.
You can craft artisanal hand napkins; tomorrow morning 365 Everyday launches their new premium hand napkins with free same-day shipping.
So now every dollar you spend hosting your e-commerce site is directly funding your competitor, which is able to out perform you on the back of insane profits from things like... AWS
This is so true. I've sat at tables in Redmond where they've managed to get their competition to take turns explaining what is and is not working for their products.
I don’t think this is true at all. I see a couple of very obvious reason that large organisations go with Azure.
1) Most large orgs already have Exchange/AD/SharePoint infrastructure. Move that into the cloud and boom, you’re already an Azure customer whether you noticed it or not. Want to take some more IaaS services on? Want a cloud SCM?... Don’t worry about procurement, you’re already a customer.
2) Procurement decisions in large organisations have to satisfy a lot of different stakeholders. A big, reputable vendor, that can solve a huge number of your problems all at once is remarkably attractive to such an organisation. Azure doesn’t have the same features as AWS, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the decision makers don’t care, and the technical teams aren’t likely to use the fancy AWS services anyhow. Forklifting their infrastructure into the cloud was a enough effort to begin with.
This model is very common in enterprise software/services. Symantec and Cisco are other examples of a companies exploiting the same dynamics. Their products are mostly garbage, they go around acquiring other products, and then poorly incorporating them into their portfolio. But they have a large market share to sell new things into, and when they’re talking to their customers they can pitch “just buy all of our products, and that’s like 80% of your compliance worries solved. No need to deal with 10 vendors”.
Microsoft are actively telling their customers (Enterprise) to stop paying for SQL licensing and instead, pay for Azure costings and they've waive their licensing fees.
It's a genius move considering their customers who are already embedded in SQL and Microsoft Server.
Source: we're a heavy MS SQL shop, but are on AWS and are regularly approached by MS with their offers.
I don’t disagree with #1. But #2 is not really valid IMO. In terms of cloud AWS fills the role of nobody got fired for picking IBM as opposed to Azure.
> In terms of cloud AWS fills the role of nobody got fired for picking IBM as opposed to Azure. Procurement decisions usually start with AWS.
This perspective isn’t shared by a lot of big companies. For most smaller, younger, technically oriented organisations, this is true. But large enterprises have a complete different set of values, priorities, and ways of doing things. The kind of organisations that are used to running huge Exchange, AD, SharePoint infrastructure often don’t see things that way, and often won’t be able to get much value out of AWS’s feature advantages over Azure anyway.
Of course you’ll find examples of large enterprise that love AWS, or GCP, but having witnessed how a lot of procurement decisions play out in these kinds of organisations, it’s absolutely not surprising to me to see Azure doing well I’m this segment. Especially for organisations that have invested heavily in GPO over the decades, I think a lot of them see AD alone as a killer feature.
> The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies.
This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make all hell break loose. I think most companies who actually consider this to be part of their threat model are full of themselves to actually think that Amazon would do this to their brand and the trust associated with it for the benefit of looking into systems that most likely don't contain information that's as interesting as company execs and engineers think.
I once knew someone who forbid his employees to use Google because he said that Google would copy his ideas and that his employees would leak them if they even searched for related key words.
When Amazon started expanding in retail beyond books, they signed supplier agreements to source inventory, the same way department stores have for decades.
Then Amazon used the retail sales information they gathered from these relationships to structure their Marketplace and Fulfilled by Amazon products, breaking the exclusivity clauses in their existing supplier agreements. Amazon lost lawsuits over this.
Kinda hard to call it a conspiracy theory when Amazon is upfront and out loud about their intention to use customer data to enter new markets whenever they see fit.
You don't have to look that deep to see the example.
Walmart categorically refuses to buy anything that runs on Amazon simply because amazon competes with walmart directly in retail.
having said that, i'm sure there are exceptions and some examples where they do have some stuff they use hosted on aws but that's the exception not the norm.
But yet Netflix is all in on Amazon even though Amazon Prime Video exists.
Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.
They do, and in some cases or exceptions they bypass whatever internal rule they imposed on themselves just like your examples.
However, whether it's Amazon or another, it doesn't change the fact that businesses are in general averse to do business with a company that has shown in the past that it will enter a new market if it sees money in it at the cost of its partner relationship.
How many software companies have refused to run Windows because MS competes with them? How many OEMs went all in on Linux when MS started selling Surface computers?
They don't need to look at customer data to get valuable insights. Information on bandwidth, used services, accounts and billing alone will probably get you good insight into non-public information on the business. And Amazon is very well allowed to look at this data.
I can't comment on whether Amazon would access utilize internal information for competitive purposes--I hope they don't--but it's definitely not smart to reveal sensitive product information in discussions. At one point the AWS non-disclosure agreement essentially said that they could use any information they remembered from the conversation to develop products. Unfortunately it came up a couple of companies ago so I don't have the exact text any more. It was surprising to say the least.
I love Amazon's cloud services and use them every day. Even so, you can't lose site of the fact they are a formidable competitor.
Microsoft first got onto my shitlist radar by putting a series of application vendors out of business by making bad knockoffs and leveraging bulk sales. EE&E has its roots in those stories.
With a leopard this old, it’s hard to tell if it has changed its spots or it’s just covered with old dirt. What I do know is if you get bit I don’t want to hear about it. I’ll just laugh and laugh in your face.
I’d say it’s safe to say if MS has the market dominance Amazon does now, they would absolutely be doing the same things. They used to, and would again, despite their “underdog” current PR campaign.
I’m bringing up MS’ very real history of competing within its own ecosystem in a conversation about Amazon doing the same. The big three are all snakes in the grass. Don’t fool yourself about lesser evils.
Microsoft has line-of-business software titles at different market-tiers - so you could be referring to any one of them.
At the low-end, Office 365 now includes web-based invoices, bookings (a la hairdresser appointments), and the like.
Middle-tier would be using something from their former Great Plains titles (now under the Dynamics brand). And at the high-end, that’d be a partner-customised build of MS Dynamics.
Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money!
> Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money!
They call it Excel.
Which is sadly not as facetious as it sounds. Microsoft's smaller finance tools had to compete not just externally with Intuit's and Peachtree/Sage's products but internally with Excel, and Excel has long held steady somewhere in the second or third most commonly used personal and small business finance tool.
(Source/disclaimer: I was a college intern for what for most of my time there was called Microsoft Small Business Accounting, briefly in my experience there was called Microsoft Office Accounting, and sadly didn't survive as a product during the time it took me to finish my degrees. IMNSHO it was a really good product, and I'm sad it never had the chance it deserved, because it sadly wasn't possible to beat Excel for market penetration, even bundled right next to Excel.)
I mean, they crush competitors. Not so much partners and clients.
These are all tool makers and basically competitors.
And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.
They ran Skype into the ground by compromising on the quality of the end user-experience - just like they did with MSN Messenger - and the current desktop Skype client is an Electron app (at least this way Linux still gets supported...).
Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Hangouts seems unpopular) - I don’t know what happened but WhatsApp ate Skype’s lunch and got bought by FB and the rest is history.
Skype on my iPhone X is just painful. I use it to make cheap PSTN calls when I’m abroad and simple things like switching to Speakerphone mode takes 2-3 seconds and involves opening the iOS audio output list (which has an animated opening for some reason) instead of every other app which has a single speaker button. This is but one example, of course.
They could have bought Slack, but they competed with MS Teams instead - but doing-so awfully because they still don’t have multi-tenant support in the client. Thing is - I can’t say that competing with Microsoft has made Slack any better (case-in-point: last month’s always-on WYSIWYG editor debacle).
IIRC Skype peer-to-peer architecture was a very bad fit for smartphones. For instance text messages in Skype were sent directly from client to client, requiring the two PCs to be up and running at the same time for the communication to happen. It was brilliant for PCs running 10 hours a day, making Skype infrastructure very light.
Now take two iOS smartphones, where Skype will only run when the user is focused on the app. The peer-to-peer link was simply not going to happen. Skype brilliant peer-to-peer architecture simply didn't work anymore. This is why Skype was so late to the party.
Skype went from peer-to-peer to centralised right after Microsoft bought them out - this was before modern smartphones got popular - and to my knowledge the smartphone apps were always centralised.
I'm not sure this is true? I know Azure/MS was way better with sending someone to contact my team (as well as other larger corporations I got to talk to) to figure out a type of partnership with us and determine the level of support we'd need. I don't think Amazon being a competitor is really considered for most cos, either.
I don't think there's some latent distrust of AWS or that people really equate Windows being good means Azure is good - I think it's known Amazon has top tier support, really great reliability and security (like Azure), as well as seemingly the best selection.
GCP for example isn't even in the running for most people even though I'd say Google is probably considered the 'brainiest' tech co.
Source: talked to folks at banks, a handful of startups, and manufacturers who've gone with Azure or AWS when deciding for our biz.
will use AWS data and information against those companies.
Aren't there laws to prevent this? Say I am a big retailer - target, aldi or some company at that scale using AWS. Are you saying Amazon can look into my database/code etc and learn from it and use that knowledge to compete with me? Shouldn't such a thing be illegal, though it would super hard to prove?
I did some strategy work for a global retailer a few years ago and this kept coming up, they even have a policy that SaaS tools they acquire "can't be hosted in AWS".
Their reasoning seemed a bit paranoid, but it wasn't that Amazon would secretly start mining their data there without telling them, it's that this retailer would invest 10's (even 100's) of millions of dollars in tools and infrastructure on AWS and then AWS would change their terms and conditions to allow them to look at/share data 'legally' and the retailer would be so in the hole in terms of investment/technology they couldn't leave/stop them without losing millions. They saw it as risk mitigation.
I think it's _incredibly_ unlikely this would ever happen, but if you combine that with "I don't want to give one of our biggest competitors a cent" it ends up with policies like this
Amazon absolutely looks at whatever data they legally can, because, well, they’re Amazon. Leveraging their market position to the maximum effect is not only what they do, it’s basically guaranteed.
My comment is sitting at -3 and I'm genuinely curious what people find disagreeable about it? Its a maybe cynical position but I think well earned by Amazon?
It’s a conspiracy theory. I doubt very seriously that
Amazon is going to the AWS department to look at competitors data and that’s assuming a company concerned about security is not doing encryption at rest.
They don’t need to look into your data to get valuable information.
Simple stuff that shows up on your bill, such as the amount of data transfer, the sizes of your databases and how they change, etc is enough.
I doubt there are laws that prevent them from doing deep dives into your data but that’s not really the concern. I don’t expect them to do that.
However, when it comes to trying to solve problems, create bespoke apps, as a retailer you will probably be far more comfortable sharing the information about your data with a Microsoft rep than an AWS rep helping you build that bespoke solution.
Potentially yes but when have big tech ever played by the rules though. Its hard to name a single FAANG company that hasn't used terrible/outright illegal practises to get to the top.
The implications of Amazon illegally sniffing data from partners to use for its retail business are apocalyptic.
They are risking 1 Trillion dollars in lawsuits, for what?
I don't think that this is happening in any detail, however, maybe some high level things, such as account size, configuration etc. - that information could be leaked. But some category manager at Amazon.com husting the logs from Nodrstrom on AWS ... I don't think so.
> MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners.
MS claim to fame was by providing tools to a partner and directly competing with their partner.
"In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2."
There's so much more to the IBM/Microsoft OS/2 story than the quote you posted. In fact, there have been books written about it. I'm not sure your quote accurately captures what actually happened over those 5 or so years.
No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies.
MS has a long history of being a provider of tools and not really competing with partners. Even when they did start competing (such as with the Surface line) it was done in a way that has not really hurt the partners and has probably helped them by raising the Windows brand in the premium space vis a vis a Mac.