This past week, we saw two of the “Big 3” cloud providers present an update of their respective cloud visions, business progress, announcements and innovations. The content at these events had many overlapping themes including modern cloud infrastructure at global scale, applying advanced machine intelligence, end-to-end data platforms, the future of work, automation and a taste of the metaverse/Web 3.0. And more. 

Despite the striking similarities, the differences between these two cloud platforms, and that of AWS, remain significant with Microsoft leveraging its massive application software footprint to dominate virtually all markets; AndGoogle doing everything in its power to keep up with the frenetic pace of today’s cloud innovation which was set into motion a decade and a half ago by AWS. 

In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the immense amount of content presented by the CEOs of Microsoft and Google Cloud at Microsoft Ignite and Google Cloud Next. We’ll also quantify with ETR survey data, the relative position of these two cloud giants in four key sectors – Cloud IaaS, BI analytics, data platforms and collaboration software.