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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

Not really. When people buy Office 365, they're primarily purchasing a the MS Office product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery. That doesn't really make this cloud revenue.

Imagine if MS was forced to "unbundle" Office 365. Consumers could purchase a license to run MS Office on any platform. On of which might be hosted Azure. What percent of the Office 365 revenue would accrue to the products division compared to the cloud division. Sincere guess: 90%+.

Another hypothetical scenario. Imagine if Apple offered a deal on iPhones. Get an iPhone for free as long as you sign up for a grossly overpriced $1000 iCloud contract. All of a sudden Apple would have hundreds of billion in "cloud revenue". But no reasonable person would all of a sudden say that they're now the biggest cloud provider in the world.

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I disagree, totally. Most companies who buy Office 365 want Active Directory just as much as the office products. Azure AD is an official Azure product; it's got Azure right in the name and lives on the Azure console. AD, hosted email inboxes, OneDrive storage; that's what companies are increasingly looking to O365 for. The Office suite is just a checkbox next to those things.

You can't punish Microsoft's categorization of these things just because Amazon doesn't have directly competing products. Well, actually they do; they have Workdocs and hosted AD. But no one uses them. Both of these are official AWS products; are you going to suggest we should start sharding out Amazon's product suite by revenue per product just to get a perfectly fair comparison of revenue?

G-Suite is categorized as a Google Cloud product. I guess we should just completely cut G-Suite out of GCloud's revenue total? Even though it does directory-like functionality and competes directly with Office, Outlook, etc?

Where do you draw the line? Ultimately, you draw the line at mechanism of delivery and payment, which is what Cloud has always been about. Office 365 and AzureAD are pay-per-seat, and thus by extension correlates with pay-as-you-go, just like any other cloud product.

>Not really. When people buy Office 365, they're primarily purchasing a the MS Office product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery.

And when people buy Amazon RDS, they're primarily purchasing a database product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery.

Imagine if Amazon was forced to "unbundle" Amazon RDS. Consumers could purchase a license to run the database on any platform. On of which might be hosted AWS. What percent of the Amazon RDS revenue would accrue to the products division compared to the cloud division...

Yes, this is the literal definition of a "no true scotsman" fallacy.

Amazon RDS is literally just a hosted offering of an off-the-shelf database server (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server). There isn't really anything there to "unbundle".

Amazon Aurora does appear to be a somewhat unique offering, but it appears to be tightly coupled to their infrastructure; I doubt that it could be unbundled without major rearchitecture.

But there are unbundled DBs that people run. PostgreSQL, mongo, MySQL and the majority of those are run on the AWS cloud.

There is clearly a distinction here. For example, I don’t know if the word Azure is even mentioned when I go to buy an O365 license.

> But there are unbundled DBs that people run. PostgreSQL, mongo, MySQL

And people can still buy standalone Office installations.

> For example, I don’t know if the word Azure is even mentioned when I go to buy an O365 license.

How does this matter? Microsoft includes this as Cloud revenue and not Azure revenue.

I don't think this is that fallacy. It's also fallacious to dismiss something as wrong if an argument in its favour uses a fallacy.

If something is described as 'cloud' but uses a definition most people don't recognise or describe as 'cloud', that's at least worth noting. It's arguably prescriptive linguistics.

>Imagine if MS was forced to "unbundle" Office 365. Consumers could purchase a license to run MS Office on any platform. On of which might be hosted Azure.

You can literally buy office as a standalone product. That's the ONLY way you could buy it a decade ago. So the current situation is exactly what you're describing.

As a counterpoint: I purchased office 365 purely for Onedrive. I was totally happy with my ancient office products (2013?) before, but I wanted to get some cloud storage with good synchronization and sharing tools as well as a good web interface. The Onedrive/Office365 offering provided that.

However it might be true that I'm the exception on this, and that most of the Office365 licenses are sold to corporations that are more interested in the basic office tools.

I also subscribed only for OneDrive. I was happily using LibreOffice.

With Dropbox dropping support for ZFS on Linux, I had no reason not to switch. It's cheaper than Dropbox and you get Office.

Office 365 also has the cloud sync and collaboration features that are a pre-req these days for a cloud service. Whether you use them or not is another story, but they didn't just change how they price it.

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