Thread by @warchav

I'm an avid reader of @saxena_puru investment tweets and am seeing tons of interest lately in @SnowflakeDB since $SNOW IPO is coming this week. I want to help people understand the product from my perspective of actually using it vs it's competitors. <THREAD>

On the PRs and web articles people cite $SNOW's architecture of decoupled compute vs storage as a moat against competition. This is simply false as all 3 cloud providers @Azure @googlecloud and @awscloud today offer data warehousing engines that decouple compute and storage.

Another factor mentioned as a moat is $SNOW's capability to easily handle "unstructured" data, usually meaning loosely structured text (JSON, logs, etc). Again, all 3 cloud providers offer robust capabilities in this regard.

I myself am a big fan of @SnowflakeDB so what is their actual selling point? IMO there are 2 big ones.

First, for obvious reasons, the main 3 cloud providers are not running their own offerings inside their competitors cloud service. All of them offer capabilities to move data back and forth between them but it's a multiple step, low integration, high latency experience.

$SNOW is the only one that enables a single source of enterprise truth replicated between (for example) @Azure in the East coast to @googlecloud in the West coast and if needed, fail over back and forth between them while always keeping one copy as the primary authoritative one.

Second, $SNOW's founders obviously had plenty of experience with this market and made a product that is incredibly focused on a simple, streamlined user experience. The billing model, resource management, user interface are all very simple but also very effective.

The main 3 cloud providers could of course close the gap on either one of these points but right now for a MULTI-CLOUD no-fuss deployment of your enterprise data platform, @SnowflakeDB is simply the best choice.

For a single-cloud deployment, the argument is a lot more nuanced. All the main 3 offer very compelling stories, from #BigQuery's load and go model, to #Synapse integrated data engineering workspace, @SnowflakeDB indeed has tough competition.

In single-cloud, its whether the client simply likes How @SnowflakeDB does things vs the other services and it's where the simplicity and user experience piece can make someone choose it over their clouds 1st party service.

This ability to understand what data pros want out of their cloud data platform is IMO what gives $SNOW an edge *for some clients* in single-cloud scenarios. Can the company stay laser focused and innovate in this direction for years to come? I guess we will find out!