
Amazon Beats Out Google as Best Cloud Provider - drm237
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Survey-Amazon-Beats-Out-Google-as-Best-Cloud-Provider/
======
mattjaynes
They really even had that as a poll?

Amazon aggressively opened up their architecture to the community as a key
business strategy. I remember well all the clueless reporters interviewing
Bezos and constantly looking befuddled at why he would do such a thing. Now it
seems obvious.

Google has arguably even greater architecture, but they keep it under tight
wraps. I can see why - they probably don't want to risk losing focus on their
key revenue streams.

That's one of the key differences between Amazon and Google. Amazon seems to
be incredibly good at diversifying their revenue streams without losing focus.
Amazon launches new services and, for the most part, they take off and
flourish. Google does a few key things really really amazingly well, but I've
often seen their acquisitions/pet-projects die from neglect.

Sometimes I wonder if those differences are because of the way the companies
are organized. Amazon seems more of a benevolent oligarchy, and Google seems
more of a developers-paradise-soup.

I'm sure there are other factors at work - which are the most relevant?

------
EastSmith
Sure, currently Amazon is the best Cloud Computing platform.

The thing is in 5 years, when the price of the whole current Amazon
infrastructure will cost $10000/month, Amazon will be left with ... lot's of
AMI's (apart from original Amazon.com business).

And Google will have list of everyone's attention data, searches, video
watching, mails, readers, pictures, news interests just to begin with.

As various GAE applications will gain popularity, those applications will use
Google Accounts for authentication, well some of them at least, and 90 percent
of your web traffic will go through Google. Now they can start REAL targeting.

~~~
nebula
From what I hear the biggest chunk of cost per GB in a datacenter is already
operational costs (most of it salaries).

Even though, acquisition cost for infrastructure may drastically come down
further, operational costs may not. And AWS still may continue to do business.

I agree that having user's data with you is of more strategical value than
providing pure platform services for computing and stuff.

------
vaksel
the difference is that AWS is a new direction their company has taken. The
Google thing was just another one of their bandwagon expansions, a me too
service.

------
asdf333
this is no surprise.

who designed appengine. it is poor. they should stop trying to host the entire
thing and provide low level APIs like amazon does w/ S3 and SQS.

~~~
alphamule
you can't sell ads on low level APIs.

