Robert Cringely doesn't always get it right but he does get a lot of influential ears to listen to him, in the IT industry. No surprise here, and others have said something similar: He says only 3.5 cloud providers will survive: AWS, Azure, and Alibaba, and he gives 0.5 to Google. Google, he argues, will need to roll out cloud infrastructure for themselves, anyway, even if they have problems selling it. The losers: IBM and Oracle.
6 replies (most recent on top)
BABA is solid as a rock, we just do not know much about it. Due to its size, it'll surpass everyone else - it will take 5 to 10 years but they are getting there. Again, we just do not know much about them.
Google Cloud does have good infrastructure but they don't have the developer mindshare and they've struggled to attract the enterprise. They seem to be missing out on creativity too, in rolling out new services. Hiring TK and his cronies won't change that, in my opinion. As for Alibaba, well, Asia would trust them at least not to mention other developing countries. If you want to say they don't matter, remember the mobile handset and switch vendors that cleaned up in the third world over the last 15 years.
Alibaba is a dicey pick. Who trusts Asia to host anything on the planet for your enterprise?
The rest, um yeah.
I am not sure what he means my "Google will need to roll out cloud infrastructure themselves." Google has spent $30 billion on public IaaS cloud infrastructure and and is very competitive with AWS in terms of number of regions and availability zones, and they're considerably better in their worldwide private fiber network and arguably better in security and privacy.
RC is accurate about 25% of time, so this time I am not sure if his prediction will be right or wrong. He's always fun to read - so, it's Ok
Maybe in IaaS and PaaS, but not SaaS