

As Amazon Mimics Google’s Price Drop, Cloud Computing Grows Up - ytNumbers
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/amazon-price-cuts/

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vjz
From the article: "what these two sets of massive reductions show is that
companies like Amazon were probably charging far higher for their services
than it cost to build and run them"

It absolutely does _not_ show that. What it shows is that these are commodity
services with little differentiation, and the only lever is price.

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Aqueous
and how can you reduce the price without operating at a loss? if you left room
to reduce prices. so yes, it does show that.

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nl
It's quite possible that Amazon and/or Google is prepared to operate their
cloud (or some parts of their cloud) at a loss, or at least at zero margins.
Look at Amazon's financial statements and you'll find they operate almost all
their business on zero margin.

The reasons for that differ - Amazon optimises for growth and market
domination over profits, while Google doesn't want to see Amazon control the
entire cloud market.

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r4um
Is there a detailed google vs amazon cloud offerings/feature comparison ?

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r4um
RightScale's price comparison [http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-
analysis/aws-respo...](http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/aws-
responds-price-cuts-google-vs-aws-pricing-round-2)

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awda
The article suggests that people (who?) believed AWS was a low-margin
business. Why would anyone think that? (And who?)

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bertil
Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but the group Amazon and its founder Jeff
Bezos have clearly indicated this was their business philosophy. I have to
agree that it sounds odd when it comes to something with the cost structure of
hosted services, but at a certain scale, it makes sense.

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qq66
Amazon is very calculating when it comes to operating at low margin. What they
mean by running a low margin business is that their operations are capable of
running at close to zero margin for almost any product they carry. When they
can, they charge high margins and get to have all the extra surplus. When
competition thickens up, they reduce the prices to undercut all the other
guys.

AWS pricing is where this happens the least, by the way, since the prices move
so infrequently. In other product categories like DVDs and household items,
prices moves up and down almost daily in response to changing market
conditions.

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jroseattle
Will be interesting to see if MSFT drops prices on Azure anytime soon. Given
how focused Nadella seems on making Microsoft a competitor in the cloud space,
standing pat would seem odd.

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cmelbye
Has anyone else started investigating Google's cloud offerings as a result of
the price drops? We found a few really nice features in their cloud products
that will help us out a lot compared to what we have on AWS, and I'm wondering
how many others are exploring this.

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tyw
> We found a few really nice features in their cloud products

Such a tease. What cool features did you come across?

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kapilvt
There's quite a few.. super fast networks, network based elb (i assume cause
it scales up smoothly and instantly), persistent volumes that can be attached
to multiple machines at the same time (read only).. etc.

