Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Microsoft wishes that AWS were part of Microsoft. Yeah. Microsoft with Azure, Amazon with AWS. A lot of interesting news in the last couple of weeks with Google and Google Cloud Platform. I think there were some news that Apple was moving there. It should have been a tremendous amount of news in the last couple of weeks. Apple developing their own internal cloud, or their own cloud hardware. Apple developing their own hardware to put in their own data centers and run their own cloud infrastructure. Dropbox doing the same thing. I guess where I'm going with this is in these cloud services you have these three layers. Infrastructure as a service platform, as a service, and then software as a service. Each of these three players, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have all the layers of he stack. They started in different places. Amazon with infrastructure. Microsoft all the way up with software. Google with originally Google app engine with platform as a service. Do you think as all of these businesses are betting on that being the cash cow of the future, do all of them need all of the layers, or would Google be fine without productivity software and the software as a service layer? It's interesting. This gets a little bit into ... Maybe I'll just jump into it, my sort of tech theme. As we've been describing all of Google's strategic decisions around this business probably made perfect sense to them when they made them in the mid-2000s and even up until a few years ago. The landscape has changed and the battleground has changed for what productivity is. That's why I brought up, and why you brought this up now and why I was mentioning earlier the cloud and the infrastructure layer. I think, Ben, the answer to your question is no. I think one need look no farther than AWS to see that. AWS started as infrastructure. That's what they do. Of course, they've moved up the stack and added other things. They aren't offering e-mail. I think there is some Amazon e-mail, but nobody uses it.…

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