Microsoft Pushes Forward in Its Effort to Be More Like Amazon

September 14, 2018

Amazon is making progress in the policeware sector. The company has contracts and some strong supporters in the US government and elsewhere. Like Amazon, Microsoft covets the JEDI cloud contract. The deal is an important one because the Department of Defense has been a unit which uses and likes Microsoft’s software.

If Amazon snags the JEDI contract, Amazon may be in a position to chew into Microsoft’s revenue streams flowing from the DoD and maybe other US governmental entities. Microsoft already faces a loss of young users to the Chrome approach to personal computing.

What to do?

One answer seems to be to buy another “make it easy to program” tool for machine learning and other red hot buzzwords.

We learned in “Microsoft Acquires AI startup Lobe to Help People Make Deep Learning Models without Code” that Microsoft aqui-hired more programming tools capabilities. The company Lobe, it seems, offers a partial solution to the Amazon SageMaker software systems.

Perhaps this and other acquisitions will give Microsoft a way to scale Mt. JEDI, but we think that’s a long shot for three reasons:

Amazon has been preparing for policeware for about a decade; Microsoft is late to the game
Amazon has a hardware and software platform which creates a policeware ecosystem when combined with the Amazon content streams and archives; Microsoft does not have this “vision” and “reality”
Amazon’s policeware tactic is part of a larger strategy to become more than a provider of cloud resources and some interesting applications.

What’s the big picture? If you want to discuss a presentation of my Amazon policeware lecture delivered in Prague and Washington, DC in the last three months, let me know by writing benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. If not, well, that’s okay with me and probably Amazon, an outfit which does not emit too many chunks of information about this SageMaker thing.

Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2018

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Amazon, Business strategy, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.