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by briffle 2446 days ago
Market share is measured in some very, very funny ways. Like Office 365 being part of their cloud division, including when people download and install office on their computer. If Google was to switch things around, and have Ad-words, Gmail, maps, etc, all pay a small, internal fee to google cloud to host their servers own internal servers, I think the market-share conversation would be very, very different.
2 comments

Most of internal Google services don't run on Google cloud. Was true as of a couple of years ago and I haven't heard differently from my Google friends recently.
Just reclassify Borg as Google Cloud Internal Edition and boom, everything runs on Google Cloud. This sounds stupid but it's no worse than what MS and IBM have done. Heck, when you are your own customer maybe you could even double-count some revenue...
FWIW... most of Amazon's internal infrastructure was NOT run on AWS as of a couple of years ago. The idea that AWS was built to support Amazon is a myth. In fact, most of their own IaaS was a very traditional data center built on converged infrastructure. This is why Amazon was up and running when AWS would have a large outage.
>> Like Office 365 being part of their cloud division, including when people download and install office on their computer.

It's even sillier than that: Microsoft counts (a significant portion of) boxed copies of Office that you buy in a store as Azure cloud revenue. The justification being that buying a copy Office in a box gets you the right to the cloud-based version rather than the offline one you actually bought. Ultimately it's about flexibility.

And in this case, the flexibility to make your Cloud business whatever percentage of your total company revenue it might take in order to claim the market share numbers you want.