In the cnbc.com news story disclosing the results of the Goldman Sachs survey, reporter Jordan Novet offered this additional perspective: “Additionally, more respondents expect their companies to be using Azure than any other cloud in three years, the analysts wrote. They said 66 chief information officers responded that they will use Azure for cloud infrastructure then, while 64 said they would use AWS at that time.”

The cnbc.com story also noted that Goldman Sachs estimates that “about 23% of IT workloads are now on public clouds, up from 19% in June, and they expect the percentage to reach 43% in three years.”

Final Thoughts: Microsoft vs. Amazon

So I guess the good news for Amazon is that the tendency among big-company CIOs to prefer Azure to AWS does not correlate directly to revenue. Okay, I accept that.

But riddle me this: if you were Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy and saw the results from the Goldman Sachs survey saying that 56 global CIOs said they’re going with Azure versus 48 going with AWS, would you feel just fine and dandy because those results don’t correlate directly to revenue?

Of course not—quite the opposite.

Microsoft likes to talk about how the cloud is still in its early days, and that business customers are just beginning to comprehend what’s possible with the cloud. And because Microsoft plays at all layers of the cloud, and because it has such a long and rich history understanding the wants and needs of its customers not only in the cloud but also on-premises and in hybrid, I believe it will be Microsoft—not Amazon—that continues to be the #1 player in the cloud for the foreseeable future.