[aiappreciator]

Amazon only has AWS, their retail business isn't worth that much (maybe $200 bil max, given low margins). Online2Offline has mostly a disappointment, as the margins of tech just could not be replicated in offline businesses.

Microsoft has O365 (Dominant business tool), Github/Vscode (Dominant coding tools, also perfect datasource for AI coding), Gaming (Windows is still overwhelmingly dominant in gaming, and also Xbox exists), AI (They own 50% of OpenAI), and finally Azure.

Alphabet has the consumer google suite (Youtube/gmail/google) that just prints out extremely high margin cash. They also have android/chrome as defensive moats for the core suite.

Hence Amazon only beats out Meta in stock valuation

[somethoughts]

The one thing I always wondered about was what percentage of AWS customers are actually really just Microsoft customers running Microsoft products on AWS (essentially using AWS EC2 instances as a better Rackspace/OVH, etc.), versus AWS customers running AWS native products (i.e. S3, Redshift, ElasticBeanstalk, Kinesis etc.) [1][2]

If a significant percentage of AWS customers are using AWS EC2 instances just as IAAS for Microsoft products then the AWS market share lead is primarily due to the inertia of Amazon's MBAs having figured out how to financially capitalize x86 machines for 0% interest rates before Microsoft's MBAs did (or more likely Microsoft's historic margins were so high that they didn't want to take the margin hit).

Never could find a number for it though...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/windows/products/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfGcrV9_3kQ AWS re:Invent 2020: Win the market opportunity for Microsoft workloads on AWS

[bob1029]

> The one thing I always wondered about was what percentage of AWS customers are actually really just Microsoft customers running Microsoft products on AWS (essentially using AWS EC2 instances as a better Rackspace/OVH, etc.), versus AWS customers running AWS native products (i.e. S3, Redshift, ElasticBeanstalk, Kinesis etc.)

This is exactly us. We picked AWS because it was the only thing that fit back in ~2015. Today, the landscape is dramatically different. Given our chance to re-evaluate, we decided the new org is going into Azure. I think the #1 reason we picked AWS was the integration between EC2 and Route53 (i.e. VMs and DNS management). Our workload previously consisted of 2 linux machines, and when we moved to Azure that dropped to 1. If we went even further into the Microsoft rabbit hole, that final linux box could be dealt with.

We made an executive decision/policy at the beginning to never use an AWS-only special to build our product or business. At all points we try to maintain a stack that should be compatible on any hosting provider. We fail with things like S3 usage, but there are alternatives we could realistically switch to if it became a serious pain point. Converting an AWS lambda stack into an Azure ??? is less confidence-inspiring for me.

[adventured]

And classic Windows is still a money printing machine after all these years. It's making more in profit than Azure, gaming, search and Github/Vsc combined. Other than Apple slowly carving out additional PC market share there is no serious threat on the horizon for classic Windows.

[ChatGTP]

We used to laugh at Clippy and now…