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by tyler_larson 2772 days ago
I dug into the details earlier this year, and it turned out at the time that Microsoft counts some undisclosed but significant percentage of revenue from sales of Office 365 in their "Commercial Cloud" category, even if you buy it in a box at a store... because in theory that box entitles you to Office In the Cloud. This (Azure plus some percentage of Office) is the "Azure" revenue number that gets compared to AWS and GCP to determine the market share number that you see in all the graphs.

Can anyone confirm/deny? I'm reasonably certain this is right from my reading of financial reports, but I'm no accountant.
2 comments
Bucephalus355 2772 days ago
This is very true. There are lots of gamification the providers play to “juice” the numbers.

Here’s one example (apologies for picking on IBM). So IBM will sell you a million dollars of software for $1, and then force you to buy $600,000 of cloud even if you never use it. You don’t complain because you got a 40% discount, and IBM can “book” 600k in cloud revenue.

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baseballMan 2771 days ago
Yeah this is definitely true. I think I read that they now include "Commercial" LinkedIn revenue in Cloud revenue reporting.

Pretty sure Google does this too to a lesser extent with including G-Suite in their 'Google Cloud' revenue.

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