
Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon - mandeepj
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/microsoft-azure-sales-top-1-billion-challenging-amazon.html?cmpid=yhoo
======
iamleppert
Love this quote:

“The biggest advantage I have with Microsoft is I don’t have to go to any
other vendor for any solution -- I can go to one partner for all of my
operating systems, all of my development environment and all of my
infrastructure tools,” he said. “Why would I waste time looking at another
third-party solution?”

...

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". "I'm a lazy C-level exec." "I love
having all my eggs in one basket." "I just write a check, and all my problems
are solved." "Money buys happiness."

~~~
MichaelGG
The flip side is that you end up in a scenario where two or three vendors can
blame each other for problems. With Azure, if SQL has a problem, Microsoft has
to fix it, and can't blame any other vendors, driver, hardware, or network
issues.

Edit: Also, really? You don't think there's any benefit to integration? That's
like Microsoft's whole deal - make their stuff work well with their other
stuff. Sure, it creates lock-in, but it's also a feature users want. I want my
various programs to easily work with each other in obvious ways, and not have
to worry about compatibility issues.

~~~
rbanffy
> With Azure, if SQL has a problem, Microsoft has to fix it,

Not really. Vendor lock in still applies.

~~~
nivla
>Not really.

Mind explaining a bit more? If I buy a Samsung Galaxy S4 and the lock screen
wouldn't let me in because of a bug in Android, Samsung is still responsible.

>Vendor lock in still applies.

Again, how exactly would that be, if I am say using Ubuntu and Mysql+PHP on a
Azure?

~~~
rbanffy
And how much effort is Microsoft willing to dedicate to fix your
Ubuntu/MySQL/PHP stack?

It's only a single vendor solution until you introduce a second one.

~~~
nivla
>And how much effort is Microsoft willing to dedicate to fix your
Ubuntu/MySQL/PHP stack?

Isn't that the same as asking how much Google is willing to fix Linux for the
Android stack??

> It's only a single vendor solution until you introduce a second one.

And your solution is to tell everyone to get a VM and install and maintain
everything from scratch? Yeah that will definetly work, which is why the
internet is secure with up-to-date Ubuntu stacks from all the daily "sudo apt-
get update" keystrokes. /s

------
tytso
Comparing against Amazon's total cloud sales may be comparing apples and
orange. To quote from the article:

"Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software
provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said
in an interview."

What software is included "to create related Windows cloud services", and is
that the only use for said softare? i.e., are they including things like MS
Visual Studio? And how much of MSDN subscription fees included in the $1
billion dollar figure, I wonder?

~~~
OGinparadise
The numbers are fishy, but if they are growing by XX% (1) a year, expect MS to
reach that pretty soon. Love it or hate it, getting all your tech needs from
one company has its advantages (and disadvantages).

 _1\. Azure subscriptions have risen 48 percent in the past six months, said
Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s vice president for marketing for the server and
tools division. That unit, which encompasses Azure, has posted nine straight
quarters of sales growth of at least 10 percent, he said._

~~~
skylan_q
It's easy to rise 46% in terms of subscriptions when they offer tens of
thousands of dollars worth of their service for free.

~~~
theg2
Amazon micro instances are basically the same thing...

------
niggler
How are the free hours from BizSpark handled?
(<http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0012p>) Are those treated as
sales?

~~~
barista
Even if they did, they probably don't add to the 1B figure as they are free

~~~
josh2600
I don't want to describe this comment as ignorant but I almost feel that I
have to...

There are numerous accounting tricks employed by organizations big and small
to book revenue on promotional services.

One popular way of doing this is to charge the marketing departments budget
for the promo hours but record the cost of the hours as revenue. The overall
bottom line of $MSFT is uneffected but the product, in this case azure,
benefits from increased visibility.

I don't think Azure is doing anywhere near AWS in sales if you don't count
promo deals.

~~~
jaynate
Completely agree with this. They are giving away massive amounts of platform
time to seed usage. Better question is when Azure will break even (net,
including R&D and internal marketing transfers to the Azure business).

------
sendob
"“The biggest advantage I have with Microsoft is I don’t have to go to any
other vendor for any solution -- I can go to one partner for all of my
operating systems, all of my development environment and all of my
infrastructure tools,” he said. “Why would I waste time looking at another
third-party."

^Interesting viewpoint.

~~~
jf22
I'm an MS dev with a little Django, Rails and PHP experience and I'm always
sort of overwhelmed with the choices I have non-ms environments.

Recently I wanted to get a simple laptop for Python development and I don't
know how to begin selecting the right tools for the job. I see myself having
to make all sorts of evaluations I'm just too inexperienced to make. Which OS?
Whats PyPy good for? Is it supported on Ubuntu? Oh I can use this command to
install but I don't see an apt get example? Does that mean it won't work?

When I read about and fire up EC2 instances I feel the same way. How do I
configure them? Which one is best, etc.

With Visual Studio and the Azure tooling built in a lot of decisions are just
invisible to me and I sort of like it that way.

Of course I understand the benefits of open source and having a variety of
options is important but I'm ok with giving up a little control and power to
just get things done.

I think its the same reason we use Stripe instead of getting out own merchant
account and all that rigmarole.

Isn't Heroku similar as in Heroku makes some choices for you on how to do
things?

~~~
avenger123
You know, to some extent, this is a direct result of working with Microsoft
tools. I am generalizing but Microsoft developers get to used to getting
mostly nice and tidy answers to everything (regardless if its good).

With open-source, my gosh, you actually have to do some analysis and make a
sound judgement without having the Microsoft mothership tell you whether its
good or bad.

I don't dispute that the choices can be seen as overwhelming but this is where
experience and your own curiosity work best. You don't have the experience,
well there is many many people that do and are willing to share their
knowledge. It does require a desire to learn. The more you investigate, the
better your filter on what is good or what is bull improves.

I use Microsoft tools, they have their place. It's not a question off giving
up control and power, its a question of, what makes you better? Understanding
the dirty work that it takes to make software, OS, web frameworks, etc. work,
or having a nice little button that does this for you (I know this is a gross
exaggeration).

If you have that curiosity to understand the details even behind Microsoft
tech, using Microsoft is just another tool.

~~~
jf22
"With open-source, my gosh, you actually have to do some analysis and make a
sound judgement without having the Microsoft mothership tell you whether its
good or bad."

I think you're comment is fair but a little condescending.

Speaking for myself, I play and experiment with tons of non-ms libraries for
asp.net work, ran Ubuntu as a desktop for several years, have an trivial app
on heroku.

Just because somebody appreciates the simple things does not mean they don't
have curiosity and don't appreciate knowing technology on a lower level.

The big divide between the ms and non-ms communities is because of this sort
of comment.

~~~
avenger123
Not meant to come across that way (especially towards your comments).

I definitely agree that there is value with a full life-cycle integrated
approach that Microsoft offers with their stack. I really like what Microsoft
is doing with ASP.NET MVC. I also like their move towards embracing the best
of open source such as their recent full support of git within their stack. I
setup a gitlab virtual machine and using the Visual Studio git extension with
it has its quirks but works really well. I find this a really good compromise
of mixing the best of both worlds.

I guess my main angst is with Microsoft stack developers who I've worked with
that really don't want to step outside their comfort zone. It's definitely
obvious you are not within this group.

------
barredo
Are Apple iCloud services still hosted with Azure tech?
[http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/0051209/apples-
iclo...](http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/0051209/apples-icloud-runs-
on-microsoft-azure)

Because that alone could be a large portion of that $1B

~~~
ultimoo
Yes, as far as I know Apple hosts their iCloud jointly on AWS and Azure.

Which is a great strategy for disaster recovery or failover I think,
considering both the cloud services are the largest and are owned by
financially stable companies that have been around for a while.

------
blantonl
Who here on HN is running any portion of their startup or established Internet
business on Azure?

~~~
eli
I'm hosting some (really) non-critical stuff on a Ubuntu image on it.

It seems fine. The manager interface is actually pretty good IMHO, but Linode
is really cheap and running Linux on Azure is (I think) still a "beta"
feature. I get the hours free though BizSpark. I was thinking of setting it up
as a slave/mirror of our main sites for use as a fallover backup. It's been
pretty reliable but I haven't done any benchmarks or really tested it in any
way.

If I had need or inclination to use the Microsoft stack, though, it would
definitely be a serious contender.

------
bradhe
There is absolutely, positively, certifiably no way this is even close to
true. Did the people are bloomberg even look at Microsoft's figures, or were
they too busy counting the cash MS sent over?

~~~
mckilljoy
It seems pretty reasonable to me. If Msft makes $1 billion on 20% of the
market, and Amzn makes $3.8 billion (high-end analyst estimate) with 71% of
the market, the math roughly matches.

~~~
rgbrenner
I think those market share numbers are suspicious.. according to rackspace
they had 1.3b in sales of private cloud and public cloud services in 2012:
[http://ir.rackspace.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=221673&p=irol-
ne...](http://ir.rackspace.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=221673&p=irol-
newsArticle&ID=1784359&highlight=)

So either the total is more than 100% market share for the 3, or those numbers
or wrong.

Edit: added "in 2012" for rackspace financials

~~~
mckilljoy
I'd agree, most of these numbers are "fuzzy" and based on analyst estimates;
I'd almost be more surprised if they DID perfectly add up to 100%. :-)

------
philip1209
Can Microsoft's internal Azure expenses be accounted for in sales?
Specifically, if Office365 used $100 million worth of Azure services in their
budget, does that count toward overall Azure sales? Does part of the marketing
budget go toward giving out free Azure trials? Then, the question I ask is
what percentage of Azure sales come from 3rd parties.

------
codegeek
Doesn't surprise me. Microsoft has a strong hold in the "enterprise" (read
large corporations with bureaucratic but big pockets) sector.

------
cadetzero
>"They haven’t excited the front-line developers -- the ones who made Amazon
who they are," he said. "Those will be hard to influence."

That may be true, but at the end of the day, startups aren't generating multi-
millions/billions to spend on large server deployments.

------
mckilljoy
That looks pretty significant. Amazon Web Services are somewhere between $2
and $3.8 billion (depending on which analyst you believe), so Microsoft is
potentially within striking distance of taking the crown.

------
curiousDog
Could definitely be true if revenue from internal customers (Office 365,
Hotmail, Xbox etc) is included.

~~~
sriramk
I don't think either Hotmail or Office 365 use Azure in non-trivial amounts,
or atleast they didn't in my time there until 2011.

------
brudgers
The next time you see an article mentioning Microsoft's Online Services
Division, it's history of losses, and suggesting that Ballmer should be fired,
just remember that Azure's revenue is not part of the Online Services Division
(and neither is Office 365).

------
skylan_q
I've been using azure a bunch at work. I don't know where the sales numbers
come from. I have reasons for being skeptical after being in on conversations
with their sales reps. I hate how they hide important details about their
systems. The shroud of mystery is really infuriating.

Useful bits in terms of performance metrics just aren't there or just aren't
visible. I've used Amazon's services and Rackspace's services as well. I've
had mixed experiences with all of them. I honestly feel that I'd be getting
work done much quicker if I was just handed a vmware portal and managed VMs in
a datacenter to implement our systems. It's very nice when you're able to SSH
into a system and run top or other tools to see what's going on. Running
queries or checking out charts that show data at hourly intervals is next to
useless. As an added bonus, I wouldn't have to stop queries and go up to the
application layer and reconnect to another shard in order to continue my
query.

I honestly don't know what's so appealing about Azure. Maybe devs these days
don't know how to ping a server or set up a database. If it weren't for
getting tons of free cash to start, we'd be on about 1/10th the "budget" using
other services. But it's hard to beat free.

Would I ever pay for it? Yes. But only in the situation where I had a bunch of
sub-par developers. Id also be looking for an out from the company while
getting patted on the back for going with MS.

------
derengel
They are fast too, they already have ubuntu 13.04

------
quaffapint
I LOVE Visual Studio and working in C# / Asp.Net MVC. I do it full time at
work, and now writing my SaaS in it which I plan to host on Azure (though, I
wish they had an official MongoDB offering).

I've always done PHP on my side stuff, partly because of the hosting issues,
but now with PaaS' like Azure and Appharbor, people who enjoy the MS Stack at
least have reasonable options.

People bitch about MS, but without competition from Azure, Google, and others,
Amazon wouldn't keep lowering their rates.

~~~
junto
Mongo in Azure VM: [http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/common-
tasks/...](http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/common-
tasks/mongodb-on-a-linux-vm/)

------
tbatterii
anyone know what app engine sales are? I don't recall ever seeing it mentioned
in investor relations stuff makes me wonder why or if/when they will kill it.

------
staunch
Considering the pricing on their server software, I imagine at $1 billion
revenue they must have a solid 10 happy customers.

------
ianstallings
Knowing the price of Azure that should mean they have roughly _pulls out
calculator and hits some keys_.. 12 customers.

~~~
gecko
Microsoft's prices for Azure are actually very reasonable, and I generally
find their tools easier to configure and use in real life. Microsoft makes
some horrible products, but I actually _really_ like Azure a lot.

~~~
captainchaos
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDAyI0imqGE>

I checked this out as a pretty heavy AWS user, and I have to admit that GUI
looks pretty nice.

~~~
locusm
Make sure you benchmark the VM's if you intend to use them - performance was
horrible during the preview.
<http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1206086-BY-1103157IV31>

------
gravitronic
This seems highly unlikely considering they don't remember to update the azure
SSL certificate two years in a row.

[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/02/25/windo...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/02/25/windows-
azure-cloud-crashed-by-expired-ssl-certificate/)

~~~
marshray
It's not " _the_ azure SSL certificate", it's more that there are a great many
of them being used internally between many systems.

~~~
gravitronic
It caused a global outage for SSL access to their cloud storage. Two years in
a row. Close enough.

~~~
sriramk
They were two very distinct issues, both in retrospect, should have been
preventable. One was a cert not getting renewed correctly (which is really
more of an engg/ops process thing) and the other was a piece of code that did
date checks incorrectly.

[Disclaimer - early and long time Azure guy at MSFT]

