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Cringley's Next 2019 Predictions: Only 3.5 Cloud Players Will Survive (cringely.com)
Ten days ago 66-year-old tech pundit Robert Cringely revealed the first of what may be his final set of annual predictions for the technology industry -- but he's not done yet. Thursday Cringely predicted that "the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) solution based on Open Source using Linux will change the Internet-as-a-Service Cloudscape to VPC-only during 2019" -- and that there'll be an industry-wide shakeout.
Long-time Slashdot reader supremebob, a Connecticut-based sys-admin, writes: He seems to believe that IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud and doomed to fail, and Alibaba will only survive because of its strong Chinese presence. These seem like safe predictions, but his comments on Google Cloud are somewhat controversial...
After AWS, Alibaba, and Microsoft, "All the others will eventually disappear," Cringely writes, adding "Remember you read it first here." Google's largest cloud customer will always be Google and that will inevitably lead to poorer service for outside customers. That's why I think of Google Cloud as half of a player. Feel free to prove me wrong by delighting customers, Google... I don't see the marketing effort to help clients migrate. Lots of handholding is needed that IBM and Microsoft are happy to provide. Google does not understand customers whose IQs are sub-200. As such, Google doesn't have (and likely won't) have a history of winning outside of search advertising.
For IBM, their VPC roll-out is coming in the next month or two, but it's more marketing than an actual product. Big Blue simply has no capital to build out a unique offering. And Oracle? Well the new head of Google Cloud came from Oracle, where not enough was happening.
Cringely also predicts the U.S. government will try to force Amazon to spin-off its near-monopoly cloud business, noting that "the larger customers of AWS (those not operating on a credit card) generally hate Amazon because of its ruthless business behavior."
Lots of pressure will come to bear in this case from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, who are all suffering from a very specific database problem competing with AWS. Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that they've rolled into their cloud services. AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage.
Long-time Slashdot reader supremebob, a Connecticut-based sys-admin, writes: He seems to believe that IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud and doomed to fail, and Alibaba will only survive because of its strong Chinese presence. These seem like safe predictions, but his comments on Google Cloud are somewhat controversial...
After AWS, Alibaba, and Microsoft, "All the others will eventually disappear," Cringely writes, adding "Remember you read it first here." Google's largest cloud customer will always be Google and that will inevitably lead to poorer service for outside customers. That's why I think of Google Cloud as half of a player. Feel free to prove me wrong by delighting customers, Google... I don't see the marketing effort to help clients migrate. Lots of handholding is needed that IBM and Microsoft are happy to provide. Google does not understand customers whose IQs are sub-200. As such, Google doesn't have (and likely won't) have a history of winning outside of search advertising.
For IBM, their VPC roll-out is coming in the next month or two, but it's more marketing than an actual product. Big Blue simply has no capital to build out a unique offering. And Oracle? Well the new head of Google Cloud came from Oracle, where not enough was happening.
Cringely also predicts the U.S. government will try to force Amazon to spin-off its near-monopoly cloud business, noting that "the larger customers of AWS (those not operating on a credit card) generally hate Amazon because of its ruthless business behavior."
Lots of pressure will come to bear in this case from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, who are all suffering from a very specific database problem competing with AWS. Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that they've rolled into their cloud services. AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage.
We're rolling out on GCP, and with a customer as large as us, they're not going anywhere.
I figure a couple bigger players in cloud systems will get hacked or somehow compromised or simply have a major failure losing lot's of client data and that will be the reason many will back away from the cloud.
WTF is Internet-as-a-Service? As-a-Service usually means it's somewhere else and you have to give somebody a load of cash and use the internet to reach it.
Do I need to buy more internets now?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Throw it on the pile.
It'll be AWS, IBM, and Oracle.
Microsoft is irrelevant in the cloud space. Every cloud product they push is a total piece of unusable shit (sharepoint, onedrive, skype for business, etc..)
And, nobody in their right mind uses Alibaba. May as well just give all your money and IP to the Chinese.
Quick reminder that Cringley is a fraud: he was caught lying about having a PhD from Stanford and being a professor there. He claims to have been Apple employee #12, when Daniel Kottke was documented to be Apple employee #12, and it appears Cringley never worked there at all.
Cringley is a self-congratulatory fraud whose chief verified claim to fame is having worked at a computer magazine 25 years ago. Let the guy retire unremembered.
"Remember you read it first here."
No I didn't read it here first.
Of course there will be consolidation in the market. This is typical Cringley, predicting the obvious that everyone else already saw coming.
Anyone who bases their business on an ephemeral Google service is an idiot, so if Google doesn't understand customers with IQs below 200, they don't understand customers at all.
hahahahahahahahahahahaha
Maybe talk to some of the people who keep those things running.
Nation demanding their citizens data is kept safe in their own nations. With their own workers getting well paid local jobs looking after the domestic cloud services. 24/7 staffing at with professional level wages.
The EU nations will want to control tax and speech, comments, data, images due to politics and to enforce EU censorship.
China will demand control over its own data due to Communist party censorship.
The USA will offer freedom and try to enter a lot of markets globally only to find local laws demanding cloud products have to stay in that nation.
All expected US profits in US scale, US energy costs and size give way to cloud bandwidth, energy costs, legal costs, tax cost and staff costs in each nation.
Who would risk their nations own data under another nations tax, political and legal system?
Have to use junk NSA approved crypto? Junk GCHQ approved crypto? The political, tax and control over content in EU nations?
Fully support Communist China?
Host in Japan? South Korea? Taiwan the real China? Face questions from China?
Upset Spain, Germany, France with political free speech?
Find the US gov is really interested in banned groups, a user on a global cloud service?
Enjoy Irish tax levels but the EU is looking into extracting more tax?
A domestic service with national laws, understood tax rates, expert staff and full gov protection starts to look great.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Everything you said is stuff that international corporations have been dealing with since long before the cloud existed.
The prevailing model has always been to hold local corps accountable, regardless of who they are owned by. They often have to modify their offering to comply with local laws. What, exactly, is so special about cloud computing services that makes this less true?
The dominant cloud model is already built on local points of presence. Much of the rest of what you're talking about is a random spray of complaints that some people don't want to comply with local environment. Well sure, they don't, but at the end of the day there's billions of dollars at stake, so they will.
Clearly the greatest advantage for cloud providers is the technical capability to spin up infrastructure, not the physical hosting of it in the United States. For most of the planet, the US is unacceptably distant from a latency perspective anyway.
AWS will survive and continue to be king of the hill, but it would not surprise me to see it become part of a forced divestiture / anti-trust kind of thing... As a certified M$-Hater, it pains me to say Azure is quite healthy, and works quite well. The interesting things happening between these two right now is the push to move to "serverless" logic. S3 buckets and lambda functions all the way down... Is becoming today's vendor lock in play...
But I must say, having used Softlayer a bit... What the hell are they smoking over at IBM? You go to spin up a template, and it's 20 minutes to two hours before you get anything... Are they paying the janitor to go push buttons on their coffee break!?!? Seriously...
What exactly is Amazon's RDB? Is he referring to Amazon RDS? RDS supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and MSSQL. Or does he mean Aurora which is MySQL as well as PostgresSQL?
Seriously, though, /. has been covering his wacky predictions for more than 2 decades, and it was a relative latecomer to his career. It really looks like he just takes a shotgun approach. Sometimes he'll be right by sheer luck and can point at that to keep his career going; meanwhile his wackier statements drive clicks (or magazine subscriptions, in the first half of his career). Has there ever been any evidence he makes better predictions than any other person of average intelligence watching the PC industry?
Oracle is in court claiming Amazon is selling a commodity to the US DOD and therefor shouldn't have an exclusive deal for a long time. The US courts have agreed with that argument in the past. If the courts rule that a specific cloud service is just like any other, then the door is open for all the competition and the big 3 don't have the best price. The 2nd tier cloud providers are much cheaper than the big three and seem to have better tech support.
I've been renting space for my own hardware in data centers for more than 2 decades and late last year I moved almost all of it all to virtual servers. For about a quarter of the money I have much faster servers in the parts of the world where I want them. I could also have 5 global load balancers using anycast and two processing servers for less than $100/mo.
Remember, this is a guy, who was something like Apple employee #23 or something like that, who decided against taking stock in lieu of pay.
I wouldn't call him all that great at predicting trends in technology.
> AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support
Not quite.
If the author meant RDS, that is MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, or Oracle.
If the author meant Amazon Aurora, that's is own technology with an interface that looks like MySQL and one that looks like PostgreSQL but it is neither one.
Kriston
What's this Cloud v3.5?
Nation demanding their citizens data is kept safe in their own nations. With their own workers getting well paid local jobs looking after the domestic cloud services. 24/7 staffing at with professional level wages. The EU nations will want to control tax and speech, comments, data, images due to politics and to enforce EU censorship. China will demand control over its own data due to Communist party censorship. The USA will offer freedom and try to enter a lot of markets globally only to find local laws demanding cloud products have to stay in that nation. All expected US profits in US scale, US energy costs and size give way to cloud bandwidth, energy costs, legal costs, tax cost and staff costs in each nation.
Who would risk their nations own data under another nations tax, political and legal system?
Have to use junk NSA approved crypto? Junk GCHQ approved crypto? The political, tax and control over content in EU nations?
Fully support Communist China?
Host in Japan? South Korea? Taiwan the real China? Face questions from China?
Upset Spain, Germany, France with political free speech?
Find the US gov is really interested in banned groups, a user on a global cloud service?
Enjoy Irish tax levels but the EU is looking into extracting more tax?
A domestic service with national laws, understood tax rates, expert staff and full gov protection starts to look great.
I stopped reading his predictions column after he said he was going to stop doing them, five years running. Glad to see he's still at it though, but I really feel like I've moved on.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I know nothing and I haven't researched it, but if I invested in Amazon, it's because I want AWS. I give zero shits about the shopping site, Alexa, or anything else.
Is it possible IBM and Oracle merge to gain cloud muscle?
Table-ized A.I.
AMZ business tactics are no different than Chinese;
Casteism
but I predict a switch to private cloud services (e.g. cloud service running on a set of hardware and software belonging to a corporation) in about 5-10 years. whoever comes up with a best offer, will dominate the field for the following 20 years or so.
MySQL is also available in the Oracle cloud: https://cloud.oracle.com/mysql
Of course it's the Enterprise version and I'm sure that internally Oracle (mysql division) are billing oracle (cloud division) in funny-money, but the actual cost to provide it for Oracle is very low. There aren't many differences, or much coding effort, between the Community (Free) and Enterprise MySQL - just enough to get Enterprises to pay for the extra audit and thread pool (i.e. helpers for crappy applications that can't use a database correctly) support.
However the big point of Oracle cloud is not that it has MySQL, but that it can supply your on-premises private cloud infrastructure as well as off-premises public cloud. Their aim is to satisfy those people who want their data on-premises for one reason or another, but don't want to have to do the work of building that infrastructure themselves.
MS Azure cloud is wildly popular with Linux people, rather to MS's surprise - there are far more Linux customers than Windows Server customers in Azure. Meanwhile, if you want to run your desktop app back end in the cloud (i.e. Office 365) and have decent Windows hosting, Azure will do that for you with one supplier contract. That's a really strong advantage of Azure. Microsoft still has the global hold on office applications and they can, if they're reasonably smart, transition that into becoming the "inevitable" cloud supplier for companies with a lot of office-application users.
IBM... isn't looking like it has any of the advantages. They don't have the advantage of being the first choice for Chinese companies, nor the cheapest and biggest, nor the public/private single interface, nor the obvious place to keep your MS desktop apps while closing your datacenter. They're also late to the game.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Are you the one that names all the porn videos I watch?
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
...who the .5 one will be.
just like all of the companies are still around. AWS is the cloud king, Azure is second but most of their revenue comes from Office 365. Google will be a niche player as what is stated is correct...Google doesn't understand customers. IBM will get the old school business. Oracle will get most of the business for anyone that uses Oracle and any of their apps. Salesforce will suck up the slack.
really, he predicts the well-known business "rule of three" and that's news???
XaaS - Xzibit as a service?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
MS, Amazon, IBM, Google, they are just the "big" players. My company uses a much smaller provider called Omnipotech. These smaller providers are everywhere, and they are not going away just because the big boys are fighting for market share.
Lots of pressure will come to bear in this case from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, who are all suffering from a very specific database problem competing with AWS. Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that they've rolled into their cloud services. AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage.
This is not true.
There are a wide range of database engines to choose in AWS. RDS explicitly lets you choose from Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB or - Oracle or even SQL Server. And guess what else? Microsoft themselves offer a managed MariaDB instance on Azure! This guys post is straight-up bullshit and looks like he did zero fact-checking.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
We should stop now.