IBM trades cold comfort for hot air in Microsoft-AWS slugfest

It's all marketing bullshit.

Cloud vs Managed infrastructure / applications that IBM have been doing in their datacentres for years.

There is no difference other than the underlying platform is all ESX or VMware imaged so setup can be automated and scripted for reduced startup time, and that cross frame resources can be added or removed "on account" until requir...

... sorry, I caught myself not using marketing bullshit... of course I mean "be made elastic".

* Facepalm *

One of the truisms of cloud adoption, and particularly public cloud adoption, has been that it’s partly a way for the enterprise to get stuff done without involving IT

It's also a way for chilling out the CFO.

1) CFO looks at numbers, which convey "something" as there are several digits too many for his earthly tastes listed under "IT expenditures"

2) "IT is spending too much! What are you guys doing? Can't you reduce headcount? And where is the CAPEX numbers?"

3) "Sorry, all the stuff is on AWS, we just have a guy formely expert in deep-frying mars bars, now monitoring red lights on the console and a dude with a repair kit sometimes going round the offices"

4) "Oh, ok" (continues to hunt for other victims)

5) "Miss Bechum, please bring me a coffee and a cheese danish to liven up this dreary conversation"

The Conclusions do not Derive from the Facts

"it’s very, very clear that Amazon and Microsoft own the cloud."

Er, no that's not what your facts show. You said:

"Nearly two years ago, Gartner analyst Lydia Leong found AWS to have five times the utilised compute capacity of the next 14 competitors combined. (...) More recently Leong told me that AWS’ market share lead has grown, not shrunk, in the past two years."

When the market leader has 5 times the market share of the next 14 combined, and that lead is growing, then Amazon "owns the cloud" all on its own.

Microsoft is only 3 percentage points ahead of IBM. Compared to Amazon's lead, that's virtually nothing. In other words, IBM (7%) and Microsoft (10%) are peers in the cloud. Neither is really that far ahead of Google (5%), Rackspace (3%), or Salesforce (4%). Meanwhile, Amazon is at 28%.

Or let's put it this way, the gap between Amazon and Microsoft is roughly 2-1/2 times that of the gap between Microsoft and Rackspace.

If IBM is telling a few nose stretchers about market share, then so is Microsoft. IBM has far more right to lump themselves into "the big 3" than Microsoft does to claim to be peers with Amazon.

"So it’s a two-horse race, however you quantify it"

Not according to the numbers the article uses, however you quantify it. Here's what the facts in the article supports - Amazon owns the cloud, and everyone else, including Microsoft is an also-ran in a herd trailing far behind the leader. It's a one horse race.

Nonsense is Goodsense, I Guess...

AWS will -always- have the most utilized compute capacity so long as it hosts Netflix -and- Amazon Prime VIDEO streaming. That takes a HUGE amount of compute power, network bandwidth, VM's and more. But it means NOTHING. It's high-volume, low-margin work. Remove that, and study only relevant, real-world, business cloud computing (which is all that really matters in terms of high margin revenue) and all the results from all the "studies" will skew back to IBM, followed by everyone else.