The amount the hyperscalers spend on the public cloud is staggering. It requires a $100-billion+ buy-in to be considered a serious player. Today’s guest, Charles Fitzgerald, tracks hyperscaler CapEx spending each quarter on his Platformonomics blog. He parses earning reports to gain insight into who’s putting their money where their mouth is.
Charles recently published his annual 2022 retrospective on the cloud players. In this episode, we get his thoughts on the Big Three, the other guys, and the telco clouds. Click play to hear our conversation about:
- Why he started tracking the hyperscaler CapEx [01:57];
- How the Big Three rank in spending and where telcos sit in the mix [04:02];
- His insightful take on AWS’, Azure’s, and Google Cloud’s positions in the market [09:19]; and
- Why he thinks IBM and Oracle are out of the race [15:45].
Listen now by clicking play above or subscribe through your favorite podcast platform—see the links in the right column above. You can find the transcript for this episode here.
Links and Resources
- Read Charles Fitzgerald’s 2022 retrospective on public cloud CapEx spending
- IBM thinks “$1 BILLION DOLLARS” is impressive. It reminded me of this hysterical scene from Austin Powers when Dr. Evil wants to hold the world ransom—for $1 million dollars
- If you want fair share from the techCo’s, be ready to pay for their content budget, as noted in this Mobile World Live write up of Netflix Co-CEO Greg Peters’ comments at MWC
- Take a look at TelcoDR’s hyperscaler region tracker to see where all the 3 “BIGS” have been putting their regions
- Look inside Barack Obama’s head — or at least what he read last summer — by checking out his 2022 summer reading list
- It took me some practice to say “Platformonomics” for Charles’ intro. It reminded of this epic Muppet skits — Mahna Mahna
THIS WEEK’S GUEST
Charles Fitzgerald
Charles Fitzgerald is a Seattle-based angel investor, with a focus on developer platforms and infrastructure. Previously, he spent 20+ years working on platform businesses at Microsoft and VMware. He can see the cloud from his house. Follow him on Twitter @charlesfitz.


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