Amazon is now worth $1,000,000,000,000
Amazon's total market value passed $1 trillion on Tuesday, following Apple's ascent into 13-digit territory at the beginning of August. Amazon and Apple now make up more than 8% of the entire value of the S&P 500, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P.
Microsoft exec: Amazon's expansion is our opportunity
Microsoft views Amazon's entry into new business areas as a great opportunity to steal cloud customers. During an appearance at Citi's Global Technology Conference in New York on Thursday, Judson Althoff, the executive vice president heading up Microsoft's worldwide commercial business group, pointed to trust as one reason that Microsoft's public cloud is growing faster than Amazon's. "Amazon is frankly attacking a lot of industries right now, and they're pretty bold and open about it," Althoff said. "I mean, Jeff will say, 'Look, your margin is my opportunity,' and there's evidence of that, huge evidence of that, huge evidence of that in retail, of course, but also financial services and health care."
Amazon's interest in retail is well understood following its acquisition of Whole Foods and the introduction of Amazon Go convenience stores. That expansion [has] already started to help Microsoft. In July Microsoft announced a five-year deal involving cloud with Walmart. Other Microsoft cloud customers include Costco and Kroger.
[...] Retail, financial services, and health care are three of the six industries Microsoft's salespeople are particularly going after following a major reorganization that was instituted in mid-2017. "I think our enterprise customers come to us, going, 'Hey, look, we want to go to the cloud. We're not interested in going to the cloud with somebody who's interested in taking our business. Microsoft, you've known our business for decades.' So there's that enterprise trust factor," Althoff said.
After this article was published, an AWS spokesman provided a statement. "It's always hard to comment on Azure growth since they've been unwilling to break out their revenue numbers, but if you look at absolute dollar growth, AWS is growing much faster than anybody," the spokesman said. "It's typical to see comments like these from chasing competitors when they don't have the functionality and customer base to compete on their own merits."
See also: Amazon Could March Past $1 Trillion
How Amazon gets to $2 trillion
Amazon's $1 trillion market cap is the kind of attention it may not want
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First on the agenda was a new archive class designed for long-term data retention that eliminates the need for a separate retrieval process, Google says, while providing "immediate" and low-latency access to content. Both access and management are performed via a familiar set of Google Cloud Storage APIs through which objects can be tiered down to save on costs, and data is redundantly stored geo-redundantly across multi-regional availability zones.
Pricing will start at $0.0012 per GB per month ($1.23 per TB per month) when it launches later this year. That's significantly cheaper than Microsoft's Azure Cool Blob Storage, which costs $0.002 per GB per month, and competitive with Amazon S3 Glacier, which is priced at $0.004 per GB per month.
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Microsoft Exec Says Amazon's Expansion is an Opportunity as Amazon Hits $1 Trillion
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:55AM (9 children)
but customer service is over the top. Experience also.
So many others had the opportunity, but did nothing.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 11 2018, @10:05AM (8 children)
You're talking about Amazon online shopping and not Amazon Web Services, I assume.
They are pretty good [soylentnews.org] when it comes to refunds. Prices are meh, especially if an item doesn't have free shipping. You should just look on SlickDeals.net [slickdeals.net] before interacting with Amazon though.
Amazon lowered AWS prices even before they had the competition they do today, but might not be the cheapest anymore:
https://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/comparing-cloud-instance-pricing-aws-vs-azure-vs-google-vs-ibm [rightscale.com] (Nov 2017)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday September 11 2018, @11:00AM (7 children)
Even if Amazon Web Services continues to dominate in the cloud space, competition is good for everyone. At worst, AWS prices stay lower just to keep too many customers from defecting to Microsoft's cloud.
That said, I keep reading horror stories about some things on Microsoft Azure - one of the recent Reddit discussions of Kubernetes on Azure is full of complaints. Is the company still consistently unable to match Amazon or Google for product quality? How ridiculous is that? I'm not saying that I like Amazon or Google more than Microsoft. I dislike all three equally. But it feels like Microsoft makes more mistakes than the other two.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 11 2018, @11:14AM (6 children)
...because ...... it's Microsoft!?!
"Microsoft screws things up."
That's their motto!
(Copyright Gaaark...in case Microsoft DOES decide to make it their motto)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday September 11 2018, @12:56PM (5 children)
I know. I agree. I just don't understand why, and why it's so consistent. They would make a lot more money if they didn't screw up.
"Let's make emptying a Recycle Bin take forever." "Let's make the worst file copy progress bar in the industry." "Let's design the only modern consumer and business operating system that is unavailable for minutes or hours at a time while it applies operating system patches." "Let's have a file manager without tabs, so that copying files between folders is more work!" "Let's have a voice assistant, but make sure it doesn't work as well as Alexa or Siri, let alone Google Home." "Let's by Skype, and then make it worse." "Let's make a decent mobile operating system, then throw it out and start over. And then do that again, and again, and again. At least four times." "Let's make heavy revisions to our default user interface, and then put them out on the market three years before they're ready and with some of the worst discoverability in the industry." "Let's look at the gorgeous aesthetic design themes in OS X and then ship a mishmash of control panels with layout interfaces from 2018 back to 1995." "Let's put a state of the art Access Control List (ACL) permission system in our filesystem and then make simple tasks like a permission reset crash the file manager or fail outright." "I know! We'll release an operating system upgrade that renders a few hundred thousand machines unbootable."
I work in software. I know how hard it is to get everything right. But this is one of the richest corporations in the world with tens of thousands of brilliant employees, and it's still astonishing the company hasn't imploded by death from a bazillion cuts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @02:31PM (4 children)
Funny what a little back-hander to an EVP level exec can accomplish. When companies "standardize on M$", who needs quality control?
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday September 11 2018, @04:39PM (3 children)
But as big as they are, they would be much bigger if they invested the extra effort in quality and aesthetics. So even all the bribes and FUD and copyright and patent lawsuits can't stop them from losing the mobile battle and now losing education to Chromebooks and so forth.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 11 2018, @05:07PM (2 children)
But investing in extra effort in quality and esthetics costs money: would you want to deprive Gates, Ballmer et al the extra dollar it would take to implement that?
Microsoft is dying: the ONLY this be keeping them going is money in the bank and stupid people saying "But EVERYONE uses Office and Windows!".
Once EVERYONE finally finds you DON'T need Windows/Office things will be better...but STUPID is hard to overcome.
*caveat: I know some software requires windows (but less and less each day)...get off your asses and REQUIRE the vendor ships Linux compatible software!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:00AM (1 child)
It's not like the extra money spent on quality disappears into a black hole. It results in a higher quality product, which often - not always, but often - results in higher sales. So making better products might have made Gates, Ballmer, and so forth richer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:25AM
They appear unconvinced by that argument.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @12:28PM
Dog says woof!
Cat says meow!
Microsoft exec says obey!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @02:45PM
Mainly a retailer, where margins are traditionally very thin, with a few other interests and a marketplace that provides for better profits, as long as they can attract vendors, worth a trillion dollars? When did they start turning profits, something like yesterday after 20 years?
They're trading at 160x earnings. Google, another bag of air company, is currently at 50x, and is arguably a larger company,
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @08:04PM
When Steve Ballmer was shown the Courier tablet prototype he canned the program because he said Microsoft was a Windows company. In essence, he said Microsoft does not innovate, they follow. They pushed ahead with Windows 8 and the rest is history. What Judson Althoff is saying is that Microsoft has made the decision to let Amazon be the innovator and Microsoft is content to be the second or third player in a rapidly commodifying marketplace. This is a real market and companies can make plenty of money doing that but do not plan on ever seeing anything innovative.