Satya Nadella to Competitors: “MSFT Is #1; You Can All Fight for Runner-Up”

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss Satya Nadella’s bold Q4
claim that Microsoft is the #1 cloud provider, leaving rivals to
fight for second place.


Highlights


00:12 — Microsoft laid out a very clear,
unmistakable story in Q4 that it is the biggest and right now
certainly the most powerful, most influential cloud provider. CEO
Satya Nadella used the opportunity of these unprecedented
financial results to spread the word that, “We’re number one, and
all of the other hyperscalers — Google, Oracle, and AWS — can
fight for the number two spot.”


01:06 — Q4 cloud revenue was up 27% to 46.7
billion. Full year cloud revenue was $168 billion, up 23%. One
that really blows me away, its RPO for Q4 was $368 billion up
37%, so that is remaining performance,obligation, contracted
business not yet recognized as revenue. Then for Azure, for the
full year, $75 billion and a 39% growth rate in Q4. So pretty
powerful stuff.


02:04 — Nadella said, "We're the leaders in
breadth of AI products and AI infrastructure." He said, "In our
overall tech stack, nobody can touch us, and that's how we're
able to deliver at this scale." He said, "We have more data
centers than anybody else does," cutting against some claims that
have been made by Oracle and others. "We are outperforming
everybody else."


03:16 — I thought it was interesting that,
without identifying those specific companies, he referred to our
competitors and that we're doing more than them. Now, I think
this was a smart move by Nadella, right? Because we're not
talking about some technical features — these are the
technological foundations that business leaders will be betting
the future of their companies on.


03:55 — So, the hyperscalers with the best
overall capabilities are going to be the ones that those business
leaders tend to go with. I think it's a smart move by Nadella
here to say, in my view, here's where we stand. We're out ahead
of the others on all this. Now, I'm sure Google Cloud, Oracle,
and AWS will have their own points of view on this, and I would
encourage all of them to speak up.


04:20 — I'm not talking about name-calling, but
a very clear and well-articulated, reasoned, customer-oriented
set of here's where I stand versus competitors here. I was glad
to see this from Microsoft. I hope everybody does it, and later
this morning on Cloud Wars, I'll have a detailed article offering
the verbatim comments that Nadella made about these different
subjects.


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