Serious question: Who will win the “race to zero” in the cloud?

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Editorial Staff.

As the public-cloud market enters its adolescence, the pervasive concept of a “race to zero” has created an impression that only the established leviathans can compete in the space. On their path to dominance the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure gobble up nascent software-as-a-service startups and lesser infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service providers as they aggressively drive down costs and make it seem unattractive for customers to not be in the cloud. Google’s latest round of price cuts on an array of services and applications have reaffirmed this popularly held belief.

Yet, now that last week’s re:Invent conference has left AWS fanboys and girls satiated by new features, I couldn’t help but notice the conspicuous absence of the familiar price reduction announcements that have consistently generated juicy headlines. I’m not the only one. What does this mean for the race to zero? Is the cloud price war effectively over with only Google and Microsoft left playing a game of “how-low-can-you-go” chicken?…

To help answer this question, we need to unpack the kinds of features and services cloud providers typically cut costs on. But digging into the meat of the cloud price war quickly devolves into a string of one-ups and me toos. At the end of March, for example, Microsoft announced a wave of price drops to counter AWS’ own reductions. This round included “basic” machines without load balancing or auto-scaling functionality and blob storage in some geographies…

Read more from the source @ http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/25/serious-question-who-will-win-the-race-to-zero-in-the-cloud/