Business 101: Whenever you see a ridiculously huge growth figure like 103%, it's usually measured against a tiny base. See http://xkcd.com/1102/
Improving growth does mean either Microsoft's doing something right and/or the size of this market is increasing. But seeing a growth number this high means you should be very skeptical that cloud products will be able to carry the rest of Microsoft on their back going forward, or successfully challenge market leaders.
Not only is it that high it's growing 37% year-over-year! Really insane to see a business this large growing that quickly. Still very much the early days of cloud infrastructure adoption.
Except those numbers are…wrong? I mean, they’re not far off, but they’re not actually right either. You should probably never trust ChatGPT outright with facts.
Back in the day (/shakes fist at cloud) it was the slashdot effect. Rapid spikes in popularity overloading systems. We certainly couldn't handle scaling up to gmail size all at once. Maybe over a couple of years.
Of course our growth strategy is quality (people willing to pay for a good service quid-pro-quo) over quantity (free service and monetise later via ads/analytics), so we've had a slow steady growth for the entire 15 years we've been operating rather than the viral growth and sell-out/pivot that unicorns are known for.
just is positive assessment about relative size. I could be wrong about positive statement of course. But it seems very low amount for a cloud service.
I wast trying to understand how business thinking work. Not judge or praise it.
Lots of containers, "Microsoft's online operation puts big data into perspective. Bing's infrastructure is comprised of 250,000 Windows Server machines and manages some 150 petabytes of data. Microsoft processes two to three petabytes per day. "You really have to figure out how to process that kind of data to keep your index fresh," Nardella says." ( http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/230700013 )
I could continue to go on but Microsoft is clearly running Internet-scale systems.
What kind of numbers am I looking for? Thousands of users? Ops/sec? I realize it is partly due to what your thing is doing eg. website vs. a complicated app.
Yeah it is a good problem to have assuming you have cash flow.
If a billion downloads today is much larger than what it used to be, then yes, I would see it as an estimation of growth.
I see easily how can it mislead people, but, really, I don't see it as enough reason to not promote the software that way. 1 billion downloads is really something to celebrate, and I would celebrate it even if it has a potential to mislead some people.
I think it's because you severely limited the perception to a basic ranking. It's a massive undertaking to actually move up against AWS or Azure considering the incredible scale of these platforms so continuing to be #3 in customers is not really an accurate measure of progress.
The article is pretty clear on what's she's done so far. There's no denying that they have a lot of work to do but if you're actively using the platform then you'll notice that there has been a lot of change in just a few months with them, which should all help to increase that customer number.
What are you trying to decide based on their cloud platform revenue? I'm genuinely curious as to why it matters if they are huge or actually the largest on the planet.
sure, but 99% of sysadmins/devops/SRE/whatever will never work on anything that has million concurrent users.
Most startup will never reach million concurrent users. And if they do, investors will happily shuffle as much money as you need to make your site work at that scale.
Hell even million monthly users is a nice milestone that most projects never reach, and that usually translates to couple of thousand concurrent request (peak), that average laptop could handle.
I think they're looking at it from a an individual product perspective. % users of an entire company can be extremely different than % growth of a new product, within that company.
My naive assumption is that they have some neat simulated user/load system to help identify any scaling issues that might arise when launching a service, and the extreme % growth. That 3.8 billion was spread over 15 years.
Big companies often have arbitrary guidelines such as "only billion dollar lines of businesses are worth having". In this case 100M users may have been the threshold where $1B/year in revenue from the product was realistic.
Improving growth does mean either Microsoft's doing something right and/or the size of this market is increasing. But seeing a growth number this high means you should be very skeptical that cloud products will be able to carry the rest of Microsoft on their back going forward, or successfully challenge market leaders.
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