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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.
Funnily enough "might as well give all your IP to the Americans" is what the Chinese think about AWS, and also that being at the whim of the US government could be bad for your reliability. Being Chinese, they're already at the whim of the Chinese government - why add trouble by using a US cloud provider?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
AWS, yes. IBM and Oracle, no. Sure, they may always exist, but they will likely never be large enough to be relevant. Neither has shown any sort of innovation in that space and are just me-too'ing it. And for Oracle it's doubly bad because they have such a terrible reputation. MSFT is far bigger and entrenched than IBM or Oracle.
In comparing the various sizes of these providers, it's easy to forget how relatively small some of them are to AWS. A couple of years ago, AWS was bigger than its next 14 competitors *combined*. A lot have grown since then, but even just a year ago it was still bigger than the next 4 combined:
https://www.parkmycloud.com/bl...
Oracle doesn't even show up on that list.
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...
Microsoft is shitty, but they will succeed in the cloud by more or less coercing users of various on-premise products into the cloud.
Even Windows desktop/server users will wind up being forced to use a Microsoft ID to do anything with Windows, and most non-adware versions of Windows will wind up storing user profiles in OneDrive. You'll pay for it and use it whether you want to or not, and most people will wind up using it not be able to weed themselves out of it.
I don't disagree their products in the cloud are pretty stinky now, but people seem drawn to them like moths to a flame.
I’m not the biggest fan of Amazon, but their project to roll off oracle ended up successful and now they’re eating their own SQL dog food. Oracle is toast once AWS starts selling Oracle migration services at discount.