Cloud strategies — summarized
For all practical purposes, the Cloud competition is between 3 vendors for next 3–5 years. The order of leadership has been drawn. AWS at front, Azure second and Google in third place.
There isn’t an obvious strategic move that any vendor ( these 3 or others ) could make in the short term to disrupt this order. The strategies of these 3 vendors is pretty static and can be summarized as follows. Please do not confuse this with tactics, which are pretty dynamic in a given shorter time frame.
I will use a silly boat analogy ( its Sunday night and I am slowly sipping my scotch) to summarize the basic strategies of these cloud vendors:
AWS
The current boat customers are on is painful, how can we sell them a new boat, rock the boat gently and get them onto new boat?. Which sections of customers are feeling the most pain and what services can we move to the new boat? Fortunately, a section of these customers have already come onto our boat and training others on the old boat how to reach here. We don’t have to move everyone at once, but we want to move the ones willing and the ones with most pain and money.
Azure
The current boat customers are on is painful, but this is the boat we sold them and we can’t abandon it. Also, we owe it to the current customers to build a bridge to the new boat and slowly migrate them over to the new boat. For most part we should make new boat similar to current boat so customers will continue to feel familiar with their environment. Whatever we do, we must not rock the current boat.
The current boat customers are on is very painful, actually if you ask us its pretty stupid the way that boat is built. Here is a massive boat we built and we know how to operate this boat and if these customers have a clue, they would learn how great this massive new boat is and get onto it. We have the damn best boat in the whole ocean, why can’t everyone else see it?. Well, we hope customers learn to jump into the ocean and start swimming to our boat. Alright, they don’t know swimming, lets drop a million life jackets to them. What? a mere million? Lets do 10 million in 10 seconds. Man, isn’t scale great? Btw, did we tell you we have the damn best boat in the whole ocean?
These strategies won’t change and no amount of screaming, shouting or subtweeting is going to matter. These are the scripts of these cloud providers and it wont change till Cloud becomes boring and something else takes over as the next big thing.
Let me know your thoughts.
