Right, from the revenue report: "Commercial cloud revenue grew 103%". This appears to be the largest section of growth reported, so it looks like Microsoft is doing pretty well in the cloud space.

Business 101: Whenever you see a ridiculously huge growth figure like 103%, it's usually measured against a tiny base. See http://xkcd.com/1102/

Improving growth does mean either Microsoft's doing something right and/or the size of this market is increasing. But seeing a growth number this high means you should be very skeptical that cloud products will be able to carry the rest of Microsoft on their back going forward, or successfully challenge market leaders.

Usually, but not in this case.

Something about this sounded sketchy...

http://www.liveside.net/2013/05/06/skydrive-reaches-250-mill...

places Sky Drive in fourth, behind Dropbox, Google Drive, and ICloud....

From your source, "According to OPSWAT’s data (which admittedly could be wildly skewed depending on who actually downloads their software, take it with multiple grains of salt)."

Admittedly I'm referencing data I read somewhere which I can't find right now, so I'll retract the statement about SkyDrive being the biggest. It is certainly up there though and growing according to this financial report.

Almost every windows tablet sold is another user for SkyDrive. I am not sure about Windows 8 and 8.1, but significant portion of those sales will add users to SkyDrive as well. Let's not even talk about Office 365 which forces you to use SkyDrive. So while SkyDrive might not be #1 in terms of number of users, given aggressive bundling strategy, I would expect it to be close to the top in terms of growth.

But as a metric for actual popularity, that is a completely useless stat. Microsoft also used to crow about how many tens of millions of people had Windows Media Center, but most of them were just people who bought a "premium" version of windows with their pc and didn't even know what Windows Media Center was. If gazillions of people are technically users of skydrive simply by virtue of having windows, that really says nothing about skydrive's actual popularity. It's like claiming solitaire is the world's top-selling game.

> If gazillions of people are technically users of skydrive simply by virtue of having windows

Or Hotmail. I don't use Windows, but I use Hotmail and I have some files stashed away on Skydrive. This is stuff I don't access frequently where it's fine to go through the browser to get them.

I even tried it on a Mac, but it needs a case-insensitive filesystem. Amateurs...

I think Azure is great, but it remains that people are using linux for their servers.

Azure is OS agnostic; Linux runs great on it.

Hence why I said it was so great. My point was that windows is dying as a server OS, though I'm sure enterprise will keep it kicking for several decades

Microsoft even charges less for Linux VMs on Azure than Windows Server VMs with the same specs.

Exactly! Windows is a dying beast.

SkyDrive is bigger than Dropbox? Is it bundled with Windows/part of the install then?

With Windows 8, and has been part of the windows phone ecosystem for ages.

But it's more than that, SkyDrive was launched in 2007, DropBox 2008. In classic Microsoft style, they didn't really tell anyone it existed for a few years.

I'll be honest, I don't 'get' dropbox. Their security record means I'll never, ever trust them with anything beyond a lolcat, they don't really have any killer features.

The fact that on Windows SkyDrive offers much better user experience than DropBox, the implementation of JIT-downloading files, the fact it hasn't messed around with ASLR in my web browser.

I gather dropbox is better if you run OSX, but at the end of the day having 1% of windows market is better than 10% of OSX market.

A big use of dropbox is sharing files with other people.. so unless all your friends run windows as well, cross platform is actually a big deal.

I'm sharing some vacations photos with Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone and Linux users.

All of which can be done on SkyDrive. Not sure why the downvote for this.

The only one lacking a first party client is Linux. There are 3rd party ones serving it.

For simple sharing, it can be done entirely in a web browser. In fact for photo sharing SkyDrives web-based offering is much better than dropbox, from handling of exif/geotags to the whole commenting and such.

Oh, ok. It was your last lines that made me think of cross-platform availability and sharing. Let's say SkyDrive had 100% of the windows users but only 10% of the Mac users. It would not be especially useful to me since one of the two big usecases is to share many files with others as easily as possible.

Which actually (and thankfully!) I think is the problem with DropBox's business model.

Most apps I use, will happily use SkyDrive, DropBox or Google Drive. As a business, why would you ever tie yourself to the fait of one. The 'key risk' is simply to great to be tied entirely to one vendor or platform. It is one of the best arguments for making AppStore Apps multi-platform.

Which brings me back to my original point. SkyDrive has some better features, even if you only use OSX. Both Google Drive and Sky Drive are working on converging the web-app space. When people are just in a browser the word / excel / ppt / etc document editing ability (all free) is considerably better than google docs.

For sharing simple photo album, its much better, especially if you want to share with someone who can edit. It also blurs into almost facebook territory with the comment system too, but has better privacy.

I can't think of one feature in fact that would make think Hmm DropBox is the best for this. As I don't have a mac to compare, combined with my deep loathing of the UX/Design Language of OSX, I have only glanced over the feature sheet. Can't see anything SkyDrive is missing on OSX that dropbox offers.

GNOME can integrated with SkyDrive since June 2012.

Ah, thanks for the info. I tend to use Drive myself - I just assumed Dropbox was the most used/largest.