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A comment on Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business?. Parent comment

Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by kardos on Monday March 23, 2020 @04:09PM (#22668200)
> But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google.

Paraphrasing OP: Google knew how to sell ads, not how to sell cloud...

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Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by dilyevsky on Monday March 23, 2020 @04:25PM (#22668347)
And msft sales knew how to sell cloud because they’ve been selling AD and office?
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Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by jedberg on Monday March 23, 2020 @04:34PM (#22668451)
They had been selling infrastructure (Windows Servers). They already knew how to sell infrastructure. In fact, most of the first sales of Azure were just as an add on to their existing enterprise contracts.
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Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by WorldMaker on Monday March 23, 2020 @05:22PM (#22668907)
- SQL Server

- The Dynamics suite

- Visual Studio / TFS

- Windows Server family products

All of those were "cloud-adjacent" even in their proto-forms as on-premises–only offerings. Even if they weren't "real cloud infrastructure" they were big Capital-E Enterprise products and a lot of selling cloud is still B2B Capital-E Enterprise work at the end of the day.

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Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by discreteevent on Monday March 23, 2020 @06:38PM (#22669544)
I remember in the late 90s (I think) articles about how MS just didn't get enterprise and would never break in.
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Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by dilyevsky on Monday March 23, 2020 @06:56PM (#22669715)
Yeah these are on prem software licenses. Completely different from metered virtual infrastructure.
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Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by jedberg on Monday March 23, 2020 @08:38PM (#22670552)
You're not thinking big enough. It's not about the specific thing you're selling, it's the skillset.

Microsoft sales has a skillset of going into a company, talking to the CIO/COO/CTO/CEO and selling them infrastructure to run their business.

Google has the skills of going to the CMO or the marketing manager and selling them advertising.

Which of those skill sets translates more directly to selling cloud infrastructure?

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Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by WorldMaker on Monday March 23, 2020 @07:41PM (#22670143)
Sure, but the point remains that this was a sales engine that was very similar. It certainly was a faster path for Microsoft to bootstrap cloud sales teams than whatever Google's long, winding path from ad sales to whatever it is they think they are doing with GCP sales.

(Though it hasn't seemed to work effectively for IBM. That may just be IBM incompetence as old school commodity-priced Mainframe mentality should be exactly the same as cloud sales. There's probably an amusing alternate world where IBM Cloud is using something like 1950s presentations only slightly modified to sell "cloud" in 2020, just because they could.)

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Re:Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? by freepor on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @12:24AM (#22671915)
Doesn’t matter, it’s the relationships that count. People from Microsoft eat filet mignons with the top 50 IT execs at every major company. That’s why any turd of an MS product can immediately get tens of millions of paying users.
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