Inside Google and Microsoft's efforts to catch Amazon in the cloud computing services space
Alex Konrad / Forbes : Thanks: @thealexknapp
Context & Ripple Effects
This Forbes deep-dive lands a year after AWS revenue confirmed what was already becoming obvious: Amazon's cloud computing dominance, with Microsoft and Google cast as the chasers. The piece matters because it documents the moment the chase stopped being about matching AWS's head start on scale and became a strategy story — how two distant rivals actually plan to take share from a market leader.
The subsequent coverage shows the playbook they chose: by 2019, both were fighting for enterprise customers with partnerships, tailored offerings, and hardball licensing rather than price cuts alone, and the contest has kept escalating since.
First-order effects
- Amazon's AWS keeps its revenue leadership, but Microsoft and Google shift from competing on infrastructure specs to competing on sales motion — enterprise relationships, licensing bundles, and vertical offerings aimed at specific customer segments like deskless workers.
- Enterprise buyers gain real negotiating leverage as two credible alternatives court them, turning every AWS renewal into a competitive bid.
Second-order effects
- Competition migrates into distribution and lock-in mechanics: Microsoft and Amazon later strike cloud services deals promising to help sell startups' products to win developer mindshare, and Microsoft leans on licensing terms as a wedge against AWS-hosted workloads.
- By 2022, Microsoft escalates from market tactics to political ones, asking Google and Oracle to help pressure the US government into spreading its cloud spending across more providers rather than defaulting to AWS.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hyperscaler competition stops being decided in datacenters and gets decided in contracts, procurement policy, and regulation — with government purchasing power as the ultimate battleground between AWS incumbency and a challenger coalition.
- Multi-cloud becomes the structural norm not because buyers demand it abstractly but because challengers have durable incentives to make switching cheap, eroding single-vendor lock-in across the industry.
The trend: Cloud computing is shifting from a scale race AWS won early into a distribution-and-lobbying contest where Microsoft and Google use licensing, co-sell deals, and government pressure to fragment Amazon's dominance.