Google believes that Microsoft's software licenses hinder customer choice; Microsoft says AWS has "first mover" advantage; AWS also chooses Microsoft's licensing – but all are opposed to measures being applied to the cloud market that could affect them themselves.
Cloud giants exposed: sacrificing transparency for compliance?
That's what you get from reading the summaries of the hearings between the UK's market watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), and the big three cloud operators, who don't really want to see any changes as a result of long-running investigations into the health of the local cloud services market .
Positioning itself as the underdog, Google said in its hearing [PDF] that it agrees with the CMA's view of the broader market dynamics, and in particular the significant market power held by AWS and Microsoft.
This is because AWS and Azure make up 60 to 70 percent of the UK public cloud market, with Google a distant third at a 5 to 10 percent share. But we're still talking about a cloud company that posted $10.35 billion in revenue globally in a single quarter this year.
