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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Amazon is now worth $1,000,000,000,000 [cnn.com]

Amazon's total market value passed $1 trillion on Tuesday, following Apple's ascent [cnn.com] 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 [cnbc.com]

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 [microsoft.com] 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 [cnbc.com] 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 [nytimes.com]
How Amazon gets to $2 trillion [cnbc.com]
Amazon's $1 trillion market cap is the kind of attention it may not want [usatoday.com]

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