Taking another approach: Google is proof that having great engineering doesn't matter without competent business leadership. For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel -- they both have incredibly talented businesspeople with long-term focus and a focus on delivering real value, rather than pursuing the latest fad passion project.
> For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel
Amazon isn't doing all that well recently, though (check $AMZN). And I'd argue that the product design on their biggest product, the e-commerce bit, is terrible. I know so many people, me included, who no longer buy entire categories of goods on Amazon because you simply can't trust the quality/authenticity of the goods anymore.
AWS’s market position is deteriorating rapidly. They’re now at just over 30% of market share compared to 50% in 2018. Meanwhile the trend right now is big companies pulling their core infra out of the cloud and into their own datacenters. They also haven’t managed to launch a game-changing best-in-class service or feature in 5 years outside of maybe custom lambda runtimes.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this AI wave pushes azure into the forefront.
They're not doing fine as evidenced by the loss of value in their share price. AWS on its own isn't big enough, nor still growing enough, to justify a massive valuation anymore. And the web storefront is suffering too. Amazon simply isn't doing that well at the moment any way you look at it.
Not trying to be snarky, but what good business has MS done recently? Windows 11 is a shit show, ads in the start menu, milking Office and SQL, OpenAI is just an investment.
I don't follow that closely so I might have missed something.