Company growth is almost always compared on a percentage basis as individuals don’t own the entire company making that number meaningless to them. What they care about is if they own X$ in some stock today what’s it going to be worth at some point in the future.
I think that's a self-centered PoV (not meant as a criticism) which focuses on the wrong things when trying to understand the state of the cloud market.
What really matters long-term is who is acquiring the new-to-public-cloud customers as they move away from on-prem and who is attracting the new high-value workloads (AI). These are not growth of existing customer base which is why I think raw numbers are more useful in understanding the state of cloud market as we come to the end of the beginning of the public cloud era.
Revenue growth comes from both new customers and existing customers. As Assure includes many large companies like Walmart and where AWS has more startups that’s likely important. Let’s suppose Assure increases revenue from existing customers by 4% (inflation + growth) 18 * .04 = .7B and AWS increases by 8% (inflation + growth) = 36.1 * .08 = 2.9B. Which would mean 10.6 - .7 = $9.9B revenue from new customers for Assure and 12.6 - 2.9B = 9.7B revenue growth for AWS from new customers. The difference in customer bases may also be important in a downturn as Walmart is far less likely to fail than Imgur.
Granted, I chose those numbers to arbitrarily get that result. But, it also demonstrates the other reason to use percentage growth, inflation on a large customer bases implies growth where none exists.
PS: I realize they both have large and small customers, my point was not about AWS vs Assure but % vs $.
The important revenue growth comes from new customers and new workloads. You mention inflation as if it is a meaningful driver of increased revenue, but AWS has never raised its prices for any service AFAIK. Growth is 100% driven by increased usage.
Amazon showing +0$ annual growth would be a decrease in the face of inflation. Decreasing hardware and networking costs muddle the picture, but inflation means standing still is falling behind.
