Who Will Win The Google-Amazon-Microsoft Cloud Computing Price War?

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb. Author: Antone Gonsalves.

It’s a great time to jump into cloud computing. If your business runs on the Web, you can reap the benefits of a good old fashioned price war among Google, Microsoft and Amazon. The trio is lowering prices for their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud-computing platforms in order to attract developers. For startups and other companies not tied to legacy platforms, that means the time is right to get a good deal on building and running websites and client-side applications on any one of three state-of-the-art data centers.

A New Round Of Price Cuts

Less than six months after launching Compute Engine, Google dropped prices this week by about 5% for its baseline services, even though the cloud service is still in preview mode and available only to select customers. Amazon and Microsoft are expected to bring their prices in line with Google’s for their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Azure services, respectively…

That’s because the rivals have cut prices in unison before. In March, Amazon lowered pricing first, and Microsoft and Google followed suit within days. Google had Cloud Storage at the time and unveiled Compute Engine in June at its Google I/O developer conference. "All other factors equal, price isn’t going to get you to success," warned Melanie Posey, analyst for IDC. "But having pricing out of line with competitors is certainly going to set you back in the market."…

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