Can Amazon and Microsoft be beat in IaaS?

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Editorial Staff.

There’s no denying that cloud services, in particular Infrastructure-as-a-Service, has come of age. Its main gatekeepers are now playing a no-win game that limits the value you get from using their services. Businesses are getting smart to this game, but how did we end up here? More importantly, what’s next?

Feature-driven market

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure built their lead in the IaaS market (and PaaS market in the case of early Azure) by adopting the exact same strategy: by broadening their offers through new features. And it was a winning strategy. Every time they launched a new feature, they essentially created a new market and cornered the demand. As long as they could show acceptable reliability, they had little concern for additional metrics like price or performance. It’s hard to blame them since there was no one for them to compare unfavorably to, and they were making major investments to get these new services lit up…


But now that the big two are stepping on each other’s toes in a number of segments (virtual machines, storage, etc.), they are being forced to create the semblance of competition. However, their “war” in the last year has only made their firm embrace of the status quo that much clearer. Their original agility is being hindered by their need to recoup the massive initial investments they made in development, engineering, datacenters, and hardware…

Read more from the source @ http://omnifeed.com/article/venturebeat.com/2014/10/24/can-amazon-and-microsoft-be-beat-in-iaas/