Amid all the fanfare and cheerleading, Amazon's AWS growth is slowing Amazon Web Services growth slowed down a bit, but still brought Amazon cash at a record clip in the first three months of 2017. On Thursday, the Jeff-Bezos-led retail and cloud empire talked up another strong quarterly performance in its first financial report of the 2017 fiscal year: Revenues of $35.7bn were up 23 per cent …
"$890m was up 48 per cent year-over-year... The 48 per cent growth in AWS operating income is a decrease from the 69 per cent year-on-year growth AWS logged in Q1 2016."
A 48% increase to $890 means an increase of $289 from $601. That previous 69% increase was an increase of $245 from $356. Sure, it's a smaller percentage gain, but the actual growth was faster, not slower. Expecting a constant percentage increase would just be stupid, since such exponential growth would mean Amazon owning all money in the world within a few years - a little over a decade to $1 trillion income per quarter, and less than 20 years to be making more than the US national debt.
The key figure for AWS is revenue - the goal of the three big cloud providers is too expand their market share so when cloud is the defacto platform for applications, they have the platform to deliver that function.
That means that in the short -to-medium term, revenue trumps income.
When Oracle/SAP/IBM/etc are customers of AWS rather than competitors, we will see income increase as they probably will have reached their ~125-175 datacentre goal to allow them to serve any global requirements....
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