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by wegs 1949 days ago
That's kinda the point. AWS can't count their Office 365 subscriptions, because it doesn't have any. It's a question of where on draws lines. Neither is an apples-to-apples comparison.

Microsoft's moat play is to integrate with Office, Teams, github, and similar. If Azure integrates into my business processes, that's huge. And if github has a pipeline straight into cloud deployment with one click, that's huge too.

AWS' moat play might be to integrate with business logistics. Amazon has business services like fulfillment which could be part of AWS. It's a deeper moat, but not as wide. No one can compete with Amazon here without dropping billions, but many businesses don't need those services (mine doesn't).

Google Workspace has a better UX than Office 365, but is not at all enterprise-ready, and is barely b2b-ready. That doesn't look likely to change soon. Google might be able to build up some kind of moat around advertising integration, in both directions, but it seems harder.

For branding, right now:

* AWS > Microsoft > Google among developers.

* Microsoft > AWS > Google among non-tech businesses.

2 comments

I'm just speculating here but let's say Stadia becomes a big cloud gaming business for Google then that gives the velocity to Google Cloud biz similar to how Office 365 has done it for Microsoft in the cloud space. Google workspace alone can't compete with Microsoft in cloud revenue so Google needs something else in front end service on top of its cloud infra to compete with Amazon and Microsoft.
Microsoft also has existing business relationships with practically every business that uses computers on the planet. They are the king of enterprise.