Microsoft COO Kevin Turner
Microsoft COO Kevin Turner

Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner is the company’s field general, overseeing its worldwide sales, marketing and services teams, and he often says blunt things about competitors that Microsoft’s CEO (previously Steve Ballmer and now Satya Nadella) would generally couch in more diplomatic terms.

Take, for example, Turner’s comments last week about Microsoft’s competition with Google and Amazon in the cloud.

The opportunity that we have going forward is to continue to leverage the unparalleled platform that we have.  If you think about Microsoft Azure and Windows Server and the opportunity we have there the way I like to think about this is you really have about two-and-a-half companies in all of technology from a multi-national standpoint that have hyper-scale cloud.  Google certainly has a hyper-scale cloud.  And I count Amazon as a half.  And the reason I count them as a half is they’re not completely global at this point.  And they don’t have the functionality and redundancy.

Really? Microsoft has been making a big geographic push with its data centers, but Amazon Web Services also has data centers in key regions around the world.

Amazon has the largest market share in public cloud computing, powering well-known services such as Netflix, Flipboard, Airbnb and many others, and it has been steadily expanding beyond its legacy as an Infrastructure as a Service provider to offer a variety of higher-level cloud services.

AWS has more than a million business and governmental customers, AWS chief Andy Jassy said at a recent conference, showing this chart.

awschart

An extensive public cloud report by Forrester research last year said Amazon “came out the strongest of all vendors across three of our four developer segments.”

So what is Turner basing his comments on? During his talk at the Credit Suisse conference, he went on to explain his reasoning: “And when you think about those two competitors we have 19 regional data centers across the world. That is six times more than one of them and two times more than the other. And so the ability for us to bring market leading cloud technologies to our customers exists because we have hyper-scale cloud.”

Here’s a chart from a presentation by Adrian Cockcroft, a technology fellow at Battery Ventures, which helps to show what Turner is talking about.

fast-delivery-devops-israel-23-638

We contacted Amazon, and the company declined to respond to Turner’s comments.

In general, however, Amazon focuses on what it calls “availability zones” — separate data centers in isolated locations, linked to each other by fast connections within a specific region, to maintain high availability of services. Amazon has 28 availability zones across its 11 regions, and it could be argued that those 28 availability zones are what should be compared to Microsoft Azure’s 19 regions.

As part of his comments, Turner also noted that Microsoft isn’t just approaching the market from its legacy Windows business. “We had 400 million people using Hotmail.com, which became Outlook.com. We had 300 million people using Skype and if you look at our services in the cloud it’s allowed us to participate in this commodity priced storage and compute environment and upgrade those customers to our value-added services.”

Of course, Amazon Web Services is an outgrowth of Amazon’s own experience running Amazon.com globally.

Bottom line: The cloud market is highly competitive, as demonstrated by Turner’s competitive zeal. Some of Microsoft’s biggest strategic moves, such as open-sourcing .NET, are designed to improve the competitive position of Microsoft Azure. Nadella ran Azure prior to becoming Microsoft CEO.

But for a more even-handed assessment, here’s what Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, who runs the Azure business, had to say on the topic in July.

“Now, ultimately, we think there’s going to be three large hyper-scale providers out there in the world that are going to be able to achieve this type of scale footprint, basically us — Microsoft — Amazon and Google. Our plan is to differentiate from the other two by the level of enterprise-grade support we provide you, as well as the unique hybrid capabilities that enable you to deliver integrated customer solutions.”

Previously: Big changes ahead for Windows: ‘We’ve got to monetize it differently,’ says Microsoft exec

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