One is a publicly listed business with as much of an objective look at real time "worth" as possible in today's world, and the other is a private business with confidential financials.
Seems like you would be unable to even calculate SpaceX's net worth, much less compare them to a business with the most objective measure of "worth".
A private investment at this scale should have a lot more transparency and due diligence than disclosures from a SEC disclosures. If I were investing $750M, I'd have engineers under NDA review SpaceX technologies, financial auditors, legal auditors, etc.
Secondary sales place it a little bit higher (but those typically have all the issues you describe).
What I've heard is Azure is a pain in the ass, and things take three times as long to set up there, for some reason. There's also Oracle cloud but you hear way less about them. out there.
> What I've heard is Azure is a pain in the ass, and things take three times as long to set up there, for some reason.
Doesn't matter. The cost here is a rounding error. What does matter is something like this:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...
https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/elev...
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/g-suite-free-shutdown
Etc.
These sorts of behaviors take out whole swaths of businesses wholesale. It's random, and you never know when it will happen to you.
It's the difference between managing a classroom with:
- an annoying kid throwing spitballs every day (Azure)
- the quiet kid who, one day, brings an assault rifle, a few extra mags, and starts spraying bullets into the cafeteria (Google).
Yes, one is a constant source of annoyance, but really, it's very manageable when you consider the alternative.
To give an example in a closer domain: Look at how long Google lost money on cloud services through 2022 (over $15B in loses), and now only makes money by creative accounting (bundling "cloud services" together versus breaking out GCP; Microsoft does something similar with Office 365 and Azure).
Like many potential customers, I would not consider GCP because:
1) Google "support" is a buggy, automated algorithm which randomly thwacks customers on the head
2) Google randomly discontinues products
3) I've seen a half-dozen to a dozen instances where buying from Google was penny-wise and pound-foolish, and so have many other engineers I've worked with.
Google's overall attitude is that I'm a statistic defined by my value to Google. Google can and will externalize costs onto me. That attitude is 100% right for adwords and search, which are defined by margins, but not for something like GCP. If I am going with a cloud service/platform, I'll go with Amazon, Microsoft, or just about anyone else, for that matter.
That's not that Google is a bad company. Google actually did have the skill set to build the software and data centers for a very, very good cloud provider. It's just that Google's core competencies lie very far from providing reliable service to customers, customer support, or all the things which go into providing me with stability and business continuity.
"Fixing" this would require a wholesale culture, value, and attitude change, and developing a core competency very far from what Google is good at.
I put "fixing" in quotes since if you develop too many core competencies, you usually stop being good at any of them. Focus is important, and there's a reason many businesses spin out units outside of their domains of focus. If Google is able to become good at this, but in the process loses their edge in their current core competencies, that's probably a bad deal.
FWIW: I haven't yet formed an opinion on NVidia's cloud strategy. However, their core competencies appear to be very much in the "hard" domains like silicon, digital design, machine learning rather than "soft" ones. Another relevant example for what can happen when hard skills are de-emphasized at engineering-driven companies is Boeing (if you've been following recent stories; if not, watch a documentary).