cross pond high tech

Amazon has monopoly power over the public cloud because it clearly sets the price (ever downward) and has the capacity to enforce that price. Amazon is the OPEC of cloud computing and both studies actually show that because both show Amazon gaining share in a market that is simply exploding.

The way you gain share in an exploding market is by exploding more than all the other guys and we can see that at work by comparing IBM’s statement that it would (notice they are speaking about future events) invest $1 billion in cloud infrastructure in the current fiscal year, versus Amazon’s statement that it had (notice they are speaking of events that had already happened) spent $5 billion on cloud infrastructure in the past fiscal year. 

Maybe $1 billion against definitely $5 billion isn’t even a contest. At this rate Amazon’s cloud will continue to grow faster than IBM’s cloud.

Wait, there’s more! Only Amazon can really claim they have a graphical cloud. While not all Amazon servers are equipped with GPUs, enough of them are to support millions of simultaneous seats running graphical apps. No other cloud vendor can claim that.

Having a graphical cloud is important because it is one of those computing milestones we see come along every decade or so to determine who are the real leaders. Think about it. There were mainframes with punched cards (batch systems) then with terminals (interactive systems), then interactive minicomputers, then personal workstations and computers, then graphical computers, mobile computers, networked computers, Internet computers and now cloud computers. Each step established a new hierarchy of vendors and service providers. And it is clear to me that right here, right now Amazon is absolutely dominant in both cloud and graphical cloud computing. They set the price, they set the terms, they have the capacity, and everyone else just plays along or goes out of business.

Earlier this week, Google lowered prices 10 percent across the board on their Google Compute Engine cloud platform . The cost is getting so low, it’s almost trivial for anyone to absorb the costs of running infrastructure in the cloud, but you have to wonder as the cloud pricing wars continue, how low can they go and if it’s a war anyone can win.

The end game is obviously zero, but these companies have overhead and while the Big Three cloud computing companies –Google, Amazon and Microsoft –run their Infrastructure as a Service as a side business, chances are their stock holders don’t want to see them giving it away for nothing, a point we seem to be approaching quickly.

Just this week, Oracle shocked the world (or at least me) when it announced it would lower its Database as a Service pricing to match Amazon’s. This is Oracle we’re talking about, a company known for its high prices joining the pricing wars. It’s one thing for the Big Three to engage in this type of activity, but for a traditional enterprise software (and hardware) company used to high profits, it’s startling.

.../... le commerce du contenu et des données n’est que la partie visible de l’iceberg, En dessous, il y a les matériels et les réseaux. On parle souvent d’Internet comme si c’était un espace totalement immatériel. C’est faux. L’entreprise Google est un géant industriel. Elle possède des millions de serveurs dans le monde entier, regroupés dans des data centers, qui sont des usines informatiques. Pour assurer son approvisionnement énergétique, Google rachète des centrales hydro-électriques.

Même chose pour les réseaux : Google et Facebook possèdent leurs propres câbles transatlantiques et leurs nœuds de communication. Leurs activités commerciales dépendent avant tout de leurs infrastructures matérielles.