Re:The Dawn Of Cloud 2.0 And Why Google Started A Price War
by crb on Sunday April 20, 2014 @06:51AM
(#7616444)
These events don't get booked with only a day's notice. And even if that was the case, Amazon knew when Google's event was, and they could have published their new pricing a day before that, and followed up at the event.
At their last event, Amazon only dropped the prices of services which have a direct Google equivalent. To me, that's telling.
Re:The Dawn Of Cloud 2.0 And Why Google Started A Price War
by patrickaljord on Sunday April 20, 2014 @07:54AM
(#7616534)
Exactly. Plus Amazon is the market leader so they have little reasons to drop prices like that not to mention that as the article say, their other business (amazon.com) doesn't bring them huge profit. Google on the other hand doesn't care as Ads is their true money maker, they can afford to have little to no margin on their cloud offering.
A lot of the reporting of this is Google driving the price cuts, with Amazon being forced to react to Google's lowered prices; however, Amazon's major price cuts have been part of coordinated events: you don't "suddenly react" by dropping a price during a planned keynote at a long-before scheduled event.
Instead, I find it much more likely that Google keeps getting rumors of these price cuts, and decides to beat out Amazon by announcing a day early to scoop the attention; I am not certain I agree with the morals of such action (without more public disclosure), but it definitely seems to be working for them :/.
I'd thereby argue that Google just wants it to look like they are trying to fight a massive price war, but in fact they are constantly reacting to Amazon's price drops, and Amazon is actually the leader in determining what the price of this product should be; at best, Google is just opting to be "just slightly lower".