Google only lost because they couldn’t re-adjust their business for their paid products to not be similar to their advertising products.

I can only speak for the European enterprise scene, but AWS came first and in the beginning they went a very “Googley” route of not having very great support and very little patience for local needs. Then Azure came along with their typical Microsoft approach to enterprise, which is where you get excellent support and you get contacts into Microsoft who will actually listen and make changes, well, if the changes align with what Microsoft wants. I know Microsoft isn’t necessarily a popular company amongst people who’ve never interacted with them on an Enterprise level, but they really are an excellent it-business partner because they understand that part of being an Enterprise partner is that they let CTOs tell their organisation that they know X is having issues but that Microsoft headquarters is giving them half-hourly updates by phone. Sort of useless from a technical perspective, immensely useful for the CTO when 2000 employees can’t log into Outlook. Another good example is how when Teams rolled out with being on for all users by default, basically every larger organisation in the world went through the official channels and went “nonononono” and a few hours later it was off by default.

Now, when Amazon first entered the European market they were very “Googley” as I said, but once they realized Microsoft business model was losing them customers, they changed. We went from having no contacts to having an assigned AWS person and from not wanting to adopt the GDPR AWS actually became more compliant than even what Azure currently is.

Google meanwhile somehow managed to make the one product they were actually selling (education) worse than it was originally, losing billions of dollars on all the European schools who could no longer use it and be GDPR compliant. The Chinese cloud options obviously had similar data privacy issues to Google and never really became valid options. At least not unless China achieves the same sort of diplomatic relationship with the EU that the US has, which is unlikely.

So that’s the long story of why only two of the major cloud providers “won”. With the massive price increase, however, more and more companies are especially Azure for their own setups. This isn’t necessarily a return to having your own iron in the basement, often it’s going to smaller cloud providers and then having a third party vendor set something like Kubernetes up.

Right now, Microsoft is winning the AI battle. Not so much because it’s better, but because it comes with Office365. Office365 which was already a sort of monopoly on Office products, but is now even more so. A good example is again how Teams became dominant, even though it wasn’t really the best option for a while and is now only the best option because of how it integrates directly with your Sharepoint online which is where most enterprise orgs store documents these days. So too is copilot currently winking the AI battle for organisations who can’t really use a lot of the other options because of data privacy issues. So while copilot isn’t as good as GPT, it’s still what we are using. But if it ever gets too expensive, it’s not as secure as you may think. Especially not if we start seeing more training sets, or EU and US relations worsens.

I think the most likely outcome, at least here in the EU, is that anti-completion laws eventually takes a look at Office365 because of how monopolised it is. Or the EU actually follows through on their “a single vendor is a threat to national security” legislation and force half of the banking/energy/defense/andsoon industries to pick something other than Microsoft. Which will be hilariously hard, but if successful (which it probably won’t be because it’s hilariously hard) will lead to more open products.