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- Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wanted the company to invest in cloud computing sooner.
- Ballmer made the remarks on Clubhouse, CNBC reported.
- Microsoft launched its first cloud products in 2008, two years after Amazon.
- Visit Insider’s Business section for more stories.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wished he had invested in cloud computing earlier in his tenure at the tech giant, CNBC reported. Ballmer made the remark Thursday on Clubhouse, an audio chat app, in a discussion that also included Sriram Krishnan, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, and Steven Sinofsky, former director of Microsoft.
“I wish we had started probably a year or two, two years earlier,” Ballmer said, according to the CNBC report.
Microsoft launched its first cloud products in 2008 before launching Azure, its cloud computing service, in 2010. At that time, Amazon had been selling cloud services for four years.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of Amazon, is the market leader in cloud infrastructure, with a 32% share in Q4 2020. Microsoft Azure was second, with a 20% share. No other company reached 10%.
Read more: Amazon and Microsoft have more than $ 7 billion federal cloud market so ‘locked down’ analysts say real challenge will be standing out
Cloud services have become a larger percentage of Microsoft’s business in recent years. In the company’s 2020 fiscal year, which ran from July 2019 to June 2020, its “smart cloud” segment accounted for 34% of the company’s revenue, compared to 31% for the fiscal year 2019 and 29% for fiscal year 2018.
Satya Nadella, current Microsoft CEO, headed the Microsoft division that included its cloud business before replacing Ballmer in 2014. Nadella also said he wanted Microsoft to launch its cloud products sooner.
“We knew from looking at what Amazon was doing that we had to reinvent ourselves,” Nadella said in 2017.
During the Clubhouse discussion, Ballmer said Microsoft was also too slow in its attempt to launch a phone. The company bought the device business from Nokia in 2014, seven years after Apple released its first iPhone. In 2017, Microsoft said its telephony-related revenues were “intangible”.
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