Over the last week, I finally had the time to get my hands on the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for strategic cloud providers and work my way through it. As I started to write my way through my thoughts, things got pretty broad pretty quickly, so I’m going limit this particular stream of consciousness to what the quadrants are saying to me about the major players, and we’ll talk about what to do about it in another post sometime soon.
In addition to this year’s content, I also found it interesting to take a look at the trend over the last three years. I’m cropping to just the leader quadrant in the images below, and if you remember, their axis going from left to right is Completeness of Vision, and their axis from bottom to top is Ability to Execute. I think the most interesting thing to me is how Microsoft has slowly moved ahead of AWS in Completeness of Vision. Given that the image was posted in October 2023, and Microsoft Ignite happened in November, I’m not sure how much of their progress with Copilot and Fabric influenced things, but it’s interesting to note.
I’m going to admit in advance that I may oversimplify how I talk about some stuff to make specific points, but the general vibe that I get is as follows.
Microsoft, following their history, wants you to do it all with them. They want to make it all work together and make you believe that there isn’t anything that you would really need to do outside of their world. They are the ultimate follower, taking the new ideas that are out there and eventually doing it with all the wonderful integrations that make it work better within the larger ecosystem. Since they entered the cloud space, I’ve seen them copy AWS time after time and to their credit, they mostly, if not always, end up getting things to a place where it’s better. The brazenness of their release of their version of the well architected framework white paper, literally copying word for word the five pillars that AWS suggested in their original version continues to amaze me somehow. That said, when I think about what they are trying to do with Copilot and Fabric, maybe they finally caught up and are going to start to do what Excel did to Lotus 1-2-3.
It feels like AWS is an IaaS company at heart. They just seem to want to host it all and they’re counting on the inconvenience of moving petabytes of data from one place to another as their long term meal ticket. They want to mostly play nicely with all of the third party tools that did more complex things and build all of the smaller generalized components that serve as the between stuff for it all. Then, every once in a while they’ll pick off an area of tools that was mature enough to be somewhat commoditized and do their own thing in that space. From a technical perspective, you have more flexibility to do almost anything you want to, but it comes with the price tag of needing to be more technical to do it. AWS seems to focus on constantly optimizing every problem their customers face. Watching Re:Invent every year has been watching case study after case study of new things being built to address specific needs of their customers. Issues are addressed technically with both hardware and software fixes and cost issues are addressed with making everything you can do with their hardware more and more variable cost based. I had a co-worker once tell me he thought AWS was Legos, where you could build and bolt on anything and Azure was Barbie’s mansion where it was all built to their version of perfection. This year as I read Gartner, I started to realize the nuance, at least to me, that AWS seems to want to play well with other tools, but it really just hasn’t been a priority to play all that well with other clouds.
And that brings me to Google Cloud. To be honest, I don’t have the experience on GCP that I do on the other two, but it sounds like what they are doing best is allowing clients to play with multiple clouds at the same time and leverage data across them. Gartner noted that 78% of the customers that they surveyed used more than one cloud provider, so it seems like that could become more important over time. They have their strengths in certain areas, especially the online advertising ecosystem, but it doesn’t seem like they’ll have the ability to compete enterprise wide as a one stop shop. With this context, it makes sense to not force your customers to choose.
The interesting piece to me is the different philosophies. Each of the players are making a bet as to what the market, or at least what a subset of the market is going to try and do or optimize to. The number of variables around what drives those decisions is pretty big, and there’s definitely better and worse fits for everyone as of right now. That said, just give it some time, and the world will be different with different fits, so where do we go from here? I think we can find some direction in the Well-Architected Framework, but that I’ll leave for next time.
For now, I’d love to hear how everyone else is reading the tea leaves and what they’re making of this every changing data world.
Finding Order in the Chaos 