when the big one 3 cloud infrastructure providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – reported their earnings this week, it was clear that the cloud is helping to keep their total numbers up. But what was perhaps most surprising was that after years of a 33% market share, AWS was up a tick to 34% in the second quarter, according to figures from Synergy Research.
Even more surprising, after years of steady market share growth, Microsoft has stepped up its game from 22% last quarter to 21% this quarter. Google came in third and remained stable at around 10%.
Synergy’s chief analyst John Dinsdale said Microsoft’s slight decline in market share is likely due to the law of the big numbers — Microsoft was unable to sustain its recent growth.
“The days of Azure growing 50 to 80 percent year over year are over. Once you reach a certain scale, it is virtually impossible to grow organically at such high rates. So the growth rates have fallen, as they should. AWS experienced the same phenomenon long before Azure got there. Despite the changes in market share in the second quarter that you saw in our articleAzure’s year-over-year rolling growth remains well ahead of AWS,” Dinsdale told londonbusinessblog.com.
But he said AWS’s ability to continue to grow at the pace it has is nothing short of remarkable.