Amazon lifts lid on AWS money factory, says it's a $5 BEEEELLION biz

No it doesn't

As the bit you've quoted yourself says "the commercial unit THAT INCLUDES CLOUD PROGRAMS...".

That unit is the "Other" unit which MS dump a load of things that don't really fit elsewhere including, for instance, their premier support, Dynamics etc. Also if you want to be really picky, I'd argue that you can't bundle commercial Office 365 sales (included in that $2.76 billion) into any comparison with AWS - chalk and cheese.

So if you want to compare AWS with Azure - well you can't. But Azure is *way* less than AWS in revenue terms on the above basis.

Re: These numbers are comforting from a Software Engineer's perspective

"For a software engineer, AWS is great."

But it really really sucks for Infrastructure guys, Azure is much easier to manage.

Re: It's a tax con

Yeah I thought this was common knowledge by now; I was actually a little surprised by the 'poor Amazon' tone, as if the author doesn't know this is how it looks when it's going to plan for them.

Re: It's a tax con

It's not a tax con, because Amazon don't make profits. By definition. They're not hiding the profits in another company, they're spending their profits on growing the company. Some combination of buying lots of servers for Cloud, stupidly low pricing to buy market share and weird stuff like drones and Fire tablets/phones.

So no, the taxpayer is not being ripped off. The system is working as designed. You don't pay tax on retained profits used for investment.

You might argue that the shareholders are being ripped off though. Is the company now growing for growth's sake? Moving into more areas, and doing odd stuff, because it interests Bezos - and he's getting to play with the world's greatest train set at their expense? That's a legitimate concern, but not the government's problem, that's down to the shareholders. They can try to unseat him, and get someone who's willing to start making profits and paying dividends (or doing share buy-backs as it's a US company) - or they can sell. Or they can decide they're happy and stay there. Normally a company's shareprice is supposed to represent the potential future profits - so Facebook were massively over-valued on the assumption that they could keep increasing profits for a decade - while costs would be relatively static. Amazon have now been going nearly 20 years, and stopped even trying to make profits ages ago.

I remember them using some bizarre home-grown finance bollocks to claim they were profitable during the dot.com crash. They don't seem to have even pretended to care since.

I suppose you could argue it's a problem, as they take profits from other companies - who therefore also can't pay corporation tax. And if every company operated this way, then there'd be no corporation tax at all. But on the other hand, they don't disappear their money, or hoard it. They spend it on salaries, and stuff from other companies, who do make profits and (hopefully) pay tax. :So the government should still be getting the same pound of flesh, theoretically, just from different people.