cross pond high tech

Earlier this week, Google lowered prices 10 percent across the board on their Google Compute Engine cloud platform . The cost is getting so low, it’s almost trivial for anyone to absorb the costs of running infrastructure in the cloud, but you have to wonder as the cloud pricing wars continue, how low can they go and if it’s a war anyone can win.

The end game is obviously zero, but these companies have overhead and while the Big Three cloud computing companies –Google, Amazon and Microsoft –run their Infrastructure as a Service as a side business, chances are their stock holders don’t want to see them giving it away for nothing, a point we seem to be approaching quickly.

Just this week, Oracle shocked the world (or at least me) when it announced it would lower its Database as a Service pricing to match Amazon’s. This is Oracle we’re talking about, a company known for its high prices joining the pricing wars. It’s one thing for the Big Three to engage in this type of activity, but for a traditional enterprise software (and hardware) company used to high profits, it’s startling.