As a user of GCP, they are moving with new useful products every few weeks. And it's a lot clearer as an offering than the top competitor. Perhaps fewer settings, but much easier to get your head around it. A lot of developers use it as a go-to, let's see how companies react over the next years.

And Google Cloud Next '18 from tomorrow, so surely few announcements to come.

Curious to why you say "top competitor" instead of AWS. Pretty much everybody knows who you're talking about.

(disclaimer: I worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014).

> Pretty much everybody knows who you're talking about.

Then saying "the top competitor" is useful to the small number of people who don't.

People do care about conflict of interest disclosures.

in the comments section of hn? it's almost always puffery.

Are you an individual user or corporate? Their reputation for large enterprises has been not enough handholding to accompany the complexity. (Relative to IBM/AWS/Oracle) I’m curious about your experience.

Both, but small company. But I agree with you, although thry are slowly attracting very large accounts — thanks to discounts surely, but at least they get some names, which will get some names as ROI. Well worth the huge discounts, if it all pans out.

I assume over the long haul they will be the low cost producer. They need to learn to sell and support in a higher touch manner to bring in the large corporates.

This is why Azure is outpacing AWS/GCE.

Microsoft's Enterprise sales force is second to none and they are clearly the number 2 in the cloud space. However, shifting office365 (a SAAS offering) to be reported as cloud revenue is disingenuous.

I wouldn't say second to none as Oracle's Enterprise sales force are better, and likely much better rewarded.

However if you combine the whole package, from sales, product, after sales services, etc. Microsoft is so far ahead of AWS, and Google doesn't know anything about human interaction / Sales.

I'll give you that.

It runs on Azure, ties in with Azure AAD, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Graph, and is offered as part of "Microsoft 365".

What's so disingenuous about that?

Cloud is generally accepted as a series of P / IAAS offerings, where clients are paying for infrastructure. Office365 is a SAAS offering, where clients are paying for software that does something, that happens to be hosted in the cloud. In the context of Microsoft's, Google's, Amazon's cloud businesses, Microsoft is comparing apples & oranges to everyone else's oranges.

Cloud is literally any service or offering that is hosted and served over network from 1st party DCs. Office365 meets that requirement quite well.

Also, SaaS is part of cloud[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service

By extending that definition, would ~90% of Google's revenue be cloud revenue?

Sure, I wouldn't argue - everything does live in the "cloud".

People to whom this demarcation of revenue matter, don't care about how topline results are published as long as there is data on the finer points as well (which MSFT does publish).

Also, I just looked at the latest earnings to confirm my last point and they include Office365 figures not in "Intelligent Cloud" but in "Productivity and Business Processes" so what are you all on about?

> SEGMENT INFORMATION

> Productivity and Business Processes

> Revenue increased $1.1 billion or 13%, including a favorable foreign currency impact of 3%.

> Office Commercial revenue increased $598 million or 10%, driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth, mainly due to growth in subscribers and average revenue per user, offset in part by lower revenue from products licensed on-premises, reflecting a continued shift to Office 365 commercial.

How recently have you heard as I read somewhere recently (cannot find yet currently but looking) that Diane Greene massively increased their sales and support staff once she joined as head of cloud?

I’ve heard horror stories as recently as two weeks ago.

As a large corporate user I had a fairly poor experience using google cloud.

What issues did you face? Lack of support? Onboarding issues?

Mostly lack of support, unwilling and unable to add capacity in the way AWS is capable of, and other clear technical issues with their services.

Ok ya google was notorious for not providing proactive support especially enterprise customers demand a direct phone line to support team. Regarding capacity why would you consider google when you were in AWS? Was it due to pricing considerations?

While "other bets" are not showing much income, Waymo looks like it will be a big win.

As an Alphabet shareholder I'm quite happy with revenue heavily focused on advertising, since that is where I see the biggest growth opportunity. In fact I would like Alphabet to spin off their Waymo self-driving car company so I can sell my share in it. If other shareholders want to diversify they can just sell their Alphabet shares and buy a range of other stocks.

The main story here is the decrease in EBIT margin (i.e., operating margin) and the development of the monetization metrics.

Why would they want to move away from ads? Advertising is one of the more recession proof industries, when everyone else is suffering, it just keeps right on going.

Yeah, I think the ad spending as % of revenue is a serious problem. When the economy goes into the next recession I can see google getting crushed as companies cut their ad spend.

I dunno. I think ad spend overall will be crushed in the next recession but expect google to actually grow share. The power of retargeting plus intention based advertising means you can actually know "which half of your advertising is working".