From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 52

Infrastructure as a Service and once again demonstrates the value of
proximity to services and systems within a large company like Microsoft,
which developed Azure by using some of the elements of its successful
web browser Bing (Wilhelm 2012). In recent years Microsoft has not
been as successful in consumer services, but it is also making a big push
to take individuals and families, as its advertising slogan repeats, “to
the cloud.” These include Windows Live, a suite of cloud services that
includes ile storage, image, video, email, messaging, the Bing search
engine (now the second most popular in the United States), and Xbox
Live. Finally, Microsoft expects that the cloud version of its very popular
suite of word-processing, spreadsheet, and related programs will succeed
in the cloud, as what it calls Ofice 365 begins to deliver them on a
subscription basis.
Google's concentration on consumer services pioneered in its search
engine has led the company to focus on that side of the cloud market. It has
expanded the company's consumer cloud beyond search with document
storage (Google Drive), word processing (Google Docs), and entertain-
ment (Google Music) applications. Furthermore, however much it worries
tech observers, the company also sells its own devices that are entirely
dependent on the cloud for data storage and applications (Gilmoor 2013).
These include the familiar Chromebooks as well as Google Glass, which
Google hopes to use to sell pay-per-gaze, for which it holds a patent, to
advertisers (Bilton and Miller 2013). But with competitive threats from
AWS and Microsoft, Google has begun a major push into the business
market with Google Compute Engine (GCE), its IaaS unit. Again, as with
Amazon, built-in leverage matters a great deal. In this case, Google runs
its IaaS on the same technology that powers Google search, which leads
the company to claim greater reliability than AWS, especially because of
the notable outages the latter experienced in 2012 (Chen 2012). In 2013,
Google tied GCE to the Google App Engine and its global network of app
developers in the hope of beating the competition by providing customers
with a cloud service that includes privileged access to the largest set of
apps in cyberspace (Hardy 2013d). This is why Google is not reluctant
to boast: “For the most part, GCE is positioned as a way for customers
to beneit from years and years of infrastructure investments, which span
everything from our datacenter design to our operational practices, our
hardware design and software design, [and] includes the software stack”