{"id":751716,"date":"2013-05-16T14:15:39","date_gmt":"2013-05-16T18:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=646184"},"modified":"2013-05-16T14:15:39","modified_gmt":"2013-05-16T18:15:39","slug":"as-amazon-google-microsoft-beat-each-others-brains-in-who-wins-the-user","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/751716","title":{"rendered":"As Amazon, Google, Microsoft beat each others brains in, who wins? The user"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s something we often forget: Competition is good.<\/p>

The Microsoft that produced\u00a0the Windows-Office monopoly let its products get fat, dumb and happy. The Microsoft that must contend with the Oracle database juggernaut puts out a pretty good database. That’s why the sudden influx\u00a0of new public cloud riches exemplified by this week’s official launch of the Google Compute Engine<\/a>, coming a few weeks after Microsoft launched its Windows Azure IaaS options<\/a>, may be tough on the competitors but could be very good for smart IT consumers.<\/p>

Look for price cuts to continue, along with a flow of new services, and better APIs to access those services.<\/p>

While I haven’t parsed the instance-by-instance price comparison between GCE<\/a> and AWS<\/a>,\u00a0Google’s decision to sell compute instances in sub-hour increments could lead to cost savings vs. Amazon, which prices by the full hour. Don’t be surprised if Amazon responds, however.<\/p>

We’ve already seen several price skirmishes in cloud including five or six price cuts\u00a0in cloud storage in the span of a few weeks late last year between Google<\/a>, AWS<\/a> and Microsoft<\/a>. Heck, even Rackspace<\/a>, which touts its fanatical support rather than low prices, got into the act a little bit later.<\/p>

Look for this sort of one-upsmanship (one-downsmanship?) to continue as these extremely well-funded and highly motivated competitors angle to get\u00a0your workloads on their respective clouds. For the discerning IT buyer, whether she’s at a startup or a Fortune 100 company, that is only good news.
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Photo courtesy of <\/a>\u00a0Flickr user\u00a0Official U.S. Navy Imagery<\/a><\/em><\/p>
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