Cringley's Next 2019 Predictions: Only 3.5 Cloud Players Will Survive

Ten days ago 66-year-old tech pundit Robert Cringely revealed the first of what may be his final set of annual predictions for the technology industry -- but he's not done yet. Thursday Cringely predicted that 'the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) solution based on Open Source using Linux will change the Internet-as-a-Service Cloudscape to VPC-only during 2019' -- and that there'll be an industry-wide shakeout.

Long-time Slashdot reader supremebob, a Connecticut-based sys-admin, writes:
He seems to believe that IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud and doomed to fail, and Alibaba will only survive because of its strong Chinese presence. These seem like safe predictions, but his comments on Google Cloud are somewhat controversial...
After AWS, Alibaba, and Microsoft, 'All the others will eventually disappear,' Cringely writes, adding 'Remember you read it first here.'
Google's largest cloud customer will always be Google and that will inevitably lead to poorer service for outside customers. That's why I think of Google Cloud as half of a player. Feel free to prove me wrong by delighting customers, Google... I don't see the marketing effort to help clients migrate. Lots of handholding is needed that IBM and Microsoft are happy to provide. Google does not understand customers whose IQs are sub-200. As such, Google doesn't have (and likely won't) have a history of winning outside of search advertising.
For IBM, their VPC roll-out is coming in the next month or two, but it's more marketing than an actual product. Big Blue simply has no capital to build out a unique offering. And Oracle? Well the new head of Google Cloud came from Oracle, where not enough was happening.

Cringely also predicts the U.S. government will try to force Amazon to spin-off its near-monopoly cloud business, noting that 'the larger customers of AWS (those not operating on a credit card) generally hate Amazon because of its ruthless business behavior.'

Lots of pressure will come to bear in this case from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, who are all suffering from a very specific database problem competing with AWS. Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that they've rolled into their cloud services. AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage.

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