from the hiding-in-public dept

We should all know at this point that RFK Jr. is bad at his job as Secretary of HHS. But that simplistic statement apparently needs something of a qualifier. Instead, it appears we should say that RFK Jr. is bad at the parts of his job that he chooses to do. Because, according to a New York Times report, he doesn’t really pay all that much attention to most of HHS’ work.

The Times begins the piece by pointing out that as the Ebola crisis in Africa continues to rage on, already infecting several Americans who were traveling abroad, Kennedy has been mostly absent from briefings on the outbreak. He talks to the very people who could inform him of the goings on there, but he just doesn’t get many briefings on the topic. And that led the Times to try to find out what else Kennedy isn’t bothering to pay attention to. The answer, according to insiders at HHS, is pretty much everything that isn’t one of his pet agenda items.

Mr. Kennedy’s approach to the crisis reflects his broader management of the Department of Health and Human Services, which affects the health of 340 million Americans and provides health care to 40 percent of the population through Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues. Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.

Deeply mistrustful of career civil officials, the secretary has surrounded himself with a close circle of handpicked advisers and stacked agencies with political appointees aligned with his views. While major posts have sat vacant and a wave of veteran health experts and scientists have departed, Mr. Kennedy has remained isolated from much of the department’s top staff.

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Now, all of this by itself would be some combination of interesting, damning, and explanatory of why so much negative health shit is occurring in America these days. Measles outbreaks, a spate of whooping cough surging, unfilled positions, an ACIP panel that is not allowed to operate because the courts said so, and so on. Having an HHS leader completely out to lunch while we have all of these health threats around us, all so he can go chase vaccine conspiracies, chem-trails, and snakes is not exactly a recipe for good health outcomes in the country. That he’s selfishly saving all of his time for his own personal interests may not be surprising, but it does need correcting.

Kennedy took to ExTwitter to defend himself from the report, which he claimed was very wrong, because he only misses some meetings.

“You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar.”

RFK Jr. questioned the outlet on whether they bothered to check his public calendar, which is filled with back-to-back meetings that concern his role. He revealed that he’s actively involved in addressing issues and making final decisions, as he summarized his schedule, stating that he works until 11:00 pm. Additionally, he touched on how the outlet used quotes from those employees, some of whom he had fired in the past, further calling into question their credibility and fact-checking skills.

Now, if you want to understand just how completely, pathologically wrong and false Kennedy is willing to be, let’s zero right the hell in on that whole “did you bother to check my public calendar” retort. Why? Well, because by all accounts, Kennedy’s calendar is not in any way public. Multiple groups have filed FOIA requests that have gone unaddressed for years, or else filed lawsuits, in order to get access to his calendar. They can’t get it. The Center for Biological Diversity filed suit over this a year ago. Statnews.com has been after it via FOIA requests for over a year, as well.

But no such calendar, detailing who Kennedy meets with or how he spends his time, has been released by the administration. STAT has been asking the Department of Health and Human Services for Kennedy’s calendar for more than a year, via Freedom of Information Act requests and emails to the press office.

Since last year, STAT reporters have requested the calendars of Kennedy and his principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, multiple times. That has included a request last February for a calendar from Kennedy’s first two weeks on the job and then a request last June for Spear’s calendars since she started in her role. Spear, whose personal office is attached to Kennedy’s, is known to attend nearly every meeting with the secretary. 

The HHS press office did not respond to questions about the public calendar Kennedy described, the number of staffers currently in FOIA offices across the agency, the response times to requests compared to earlier administrations, or which outlets were being restricted by the administration.

It’s one thing to hide your calendar while you’re not fulfilling your obligations as a cabinet member. It’s an entirely different thing to do all of that and try to admonish the press for not checking a public calendar that has never been made public.

Either Kennedy thinks his calendar is public when it isn’t, which is a terrible look for him and his understanding of how his own agencies are operating, or he does know it’s not public, is lying about it, and somehow thinks that nobody will bother to point it out.

So, the open question appears to be whether RFK Jr. is a bumbling fool who isn’t in full command of HHS…or a bad and fairly dumb liar.

So, Secretary Kennedy, once you’re back from an extended lunch and nap session, which is it?

Filed Under: ebola, health & human services, measles, rfk jr., vaccines

Clearaudio did not exactly hide at High End Vienna 2026. The German analog specialist rolled into the show with new turntables, artist editions, and a Rammstein-branded deck that became one of the more talked-about analog products on the floor. Because apparently nothing says precision vinyl playback like industrial metal, LEDs, and a room full of hi-fi people pretending they were always huge Rammstein fans.

But the product that might matter most to real-world turntable owners is a lot smaller and far less theatrical. The new Clearaudio N2 MM cartridge is a moving-magnet design priced at just $290 USD, and that puts it directly in the path of Audio-Technica, Grado, Ortofon, and Sumiko, four brands that already own a lot of space in the affordable cartridge conversation.

The N2 is designed for broad tonearm compatibility, which makes it a practical upgrade for a wide range of turntables. Clearaudio carries over the proven motor assembly from the N1, but adds a new carbon fiber-reinforced housing produced using 3D printing technology, with the goal of improving rigidity, resonance control, and long-term consistency.

The N2 may not have generated the same noise as Clearaudio’s Rammstein turntable in Vienna, but it could prove to be the more relevant product for listeners looking to improve an existing deck without spending high-end cartridge money.

Clearaudio N2 MM Cartridge Targets the Affordable Upgrade Market

The Clearaudio N2 MM cartridge is built around a simple but important idea: control unwanted vibration before it reaches the generator system.

The key change is the new PETG-CF body, a carbon fibre-reinforced engineering polymer that gives the cartridge housing greater rigidity than standard plastic without adding unnecessary mass. Cartridge bodies are not passive decoration. They influence how energy moves through the cartridge, headshell, and tonearm. By using a stiffer, lower-resonance material, Clearaudio is trying to give the stylus and motor assembly a quieter mechanical platform to work from.

That matters because the N2 shares the proven motor assembly of the N1, but moves away from the heavier aluminium body. At 8.5 grams, the N2 is significantly lighter, which broadens compatibility with a wider range of tonearms, including lightweight designs that may not have been an ideal match for the N1. In practical terms, this should make setup easier and reduce the chances of running into compliance, counterweight, or tracking-force issues. Very German problem solving: make it lighter, stiffer, and harder to blame on the tonearm.

Output voltage is rated at 3.3mV, putting the N2 on the same level as Clearaudio’s Concept v2 series. That makes it suitable for standard moving magnet phono inputs without requiring extra gain, a step-up transformer, or other system changes. For most users, the N2 should slot directly into an existing MM setup.

Clearaudio also pays attention to the small installation details. The laser-finished black housing gives the cartridge a more precise, industrial look, while integrated threaded inserts should make mounting more secure and less frustrating than designs that rely on loose nuts and tiny hardware.

At £250, €250, and $290, the N2 is not chasing exotic cartridge money. It is a lightweight, rigid, low-resonance MM design aimed at improving mechanical stability, tonearm compatibility, and everyday usability without turning cartridge setup into a weekend engineering project.

The Bottom Line

The Clearaudio N2’s most interesting feature is not simply that it is another affordable MM cartridge. The hook is the engineering: a 3D-printed PETG-CF carbon fibre-reinforced body, low-resonance construction, 8.5g weight, integrated threaded inserts, and a 3.3mV output that should work with standard MM phono stages. At $290, that puts it directly against the Audio-Technica AT-VM740xML and AT-VM745xML, Goldring E4, Grado Gold4, Grado Opus4, Sumiko Olympia, and the unavoidable Ortofon 2M Blue.

Some of those rivals offer more advanced stylus profiles. Some have stronger name recognition. What Clearaudio brings is materials engineering and resonance control in a lightweight cartridge that should be easier to mount, easier to match, and more practical than a lot of high-end analog hardware wearing a scarier price tag.

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SpaceX is now worth more than Amazon, at least for as long as the rally holds. Shares of the rocket company rose more than 10% on Tuesday, extending a run that began at its market debut and putting it on course to become the world’s fifth most valuable listed company, four trading days after it went public.

The stock was last up 10.1% at $211.80, according to Reuters, which works out to a market capitalisation of nearly $2.8tn if the gains stick. Amazon was last valued at $2.66tn.

The move followed a 19% jump on Monday, the first full day of trading, which itself followed a debut that already ranked as the largest initial public offering ever attempted.

The numbers underneath the rally are unusual enough to merit a second look. More than $1.16bn worth of SpaceX shares changed hands, which Reuters reported was several times the combined trading volume in Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, and Apple. A newly listed company outtrading four of the most heavily traded stocks on the market, put together, is not a normal week on the Nasdaq.

Much of that comes down to scarcity. SpaceX’s IPO floated only about 4.2% of the company’s shares, rising to roughly 4.9% once underwriters exercised the greenshoe option in full.

That leaves an extremely thin free float chasing heavy retail demand, the kind of supply-demand mismatch that can move a price far and fast in either direction. A small float is a wonderful thing on the way up.

The starting point was already historic. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share for a $1.75tn valuation, raising $75bn in what TNW and others called the biggest listing on record.

The stock drew demand from retail investors worldwide, including $2.2bn from Japanese buyers alone, a measure of how broad the appetite ran before the first share traded.

The valuation it is now testing rests on a business with one profit engine and several expensive bets. Starlink, the satellite-internet division, generated the bulk of SpaceX’s revenue and effectively all of its operating profit last year, even as its growth maths has got harder and average revenue per user has slipped.

Starship and the xAI operations remain capital sinks that investors are pricing for years of growth they have not yet seen.

For Elon Musk, the arithmetic is personal as well as corporate. The listing handed him a paper fortune large enough to make him a trillionaire, and his and insiders’ voting control of the company survived the float intact. Tuesday’s climb adds to that total on paper, though paper is the operative word while the float stays this thin.

If SpaceX holds the fifth-place spot is a question for the closing bell rather than the premarket tape. A stock that can rise 19% in a day on a sliver of available shares can give the gain back on the same mechanics. For now, a company that was private a week ago is trading just behind Amazon, and the market is still deciding what that is worth.

Yueban, a Tuobang-owned brand that focuses in accessible solutions, debuted their latest innovation , Xiaoban, at the 2026 Shanghai International Aged Care, Assistive Devices, and Rehabilitation Medical Expo. This is essentially a mobile smart toilet built specifically for people who have mobility challenges or rely on others for daily care.

Simply push one button on the remote or issue a voice command to activate Xiaoban. It zooms about on its own and focuses on its target owing to a network of sensors and an internal AI that monitors its surroundings in real time. This allows it to easily avoid furniture, doorways, and other obstructions, ultimately landing at your selected location, whether it’s beside your bedside or elsewhere in the house. Consider it the opposite of your typical toilet routine, in which you must get up and go to the loo rather than the loo coming to you.

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Once it’s in place, you can sit back and relax on the stable-looking seat, and the armrests and backrest help you stay as relaxed as possible while using it. Once you’re finished, the robot will take care of everything on its own. There’s warm water for a bidet wash, a warm blast of air to dry you off, and a last flourish of ultra violet light to disinfect everything, all while its smart odor isolation mechanism keeps any leftover odors under control.

When you’re finished, simply get up and walk away, or indicate that it’s safe to return to base, and Xiaoban will return to its docking station, which is connected to your home’s plumbing system. It has an inbuilt grinder that grinds down waste, eliminating the possibility of pipe obstructions. Then it goes through a self-cleaning procedure, replenishes its water, and charges its battery so it is ready to go the following time.

Xiaoban’s navigation engine is driven by a 3D obstacle avoidance AI combined with some very slick multi-sensor fusion technology, which provides a real-time view of the room’s layout as it moves around. There are even LiDAR and other detectors that allow it to change direction on the fly if something gets in the way. The low-profile design ensures stability on any floor, and the controls are large and easy enough for almost anyone to use, even if they have limited hand strength.

Yueban created a mock-up of a home atmosphere for the event so that attendees could get a true sense of what the product is all about. The researchers demonstrated how easy it is for the robot to glide out of its dock and into a bedroom with no assistance from anyone. People were able to watch the obstacle avoidance system in action and assess how effectively it handled a real-world room, furniture, and distances between things. Caregivers, facility workers, and even the elderly would come over to check out the controls, asking all sorts of practical questions about how to operate the item on a daily basis.

Yueban’s team had been developing Xiaoban with the intention of using it in private homes, elder care facilities, and other settings. In China, it will cost around 28,999 yuan (approximately $4,000), but we don’t know how much it will cost or when it will be available in other countries.
[Source]

France’s domestic intelligence agency is dropping Palantir. The DGSI will replace the American firm’s data-analysis tools with software from ChapsVision, a French company, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on Tuesday, framing the switch as part of a wider push to put sovereign technology at the centre of the French state.

The timing is the part worth pausing on. Palantir announced the renewal of its three-year DGSI contract in December 2025, extending a relationship that had run for the better part of a decade.

Six months later, the agency that signed that renewal is preparing to walk away from it. The French government did not explain how the two decisions sit together, and it is an awkward sequence to read in order.

The replacement is ChapsVision’s ArgonOS, an AI-powered data-processing platform built by the firm controlled by the entrepreneur Olivier Dellenbach. ChapsVision had positioned itself for exactly this moment, having competed in a French procurement process launched in 2022 for a heterogeneous-data-processing tool, alongside the Thales-Eviden joint venture Athea and others.

As of late 2025, none of the domestic candidates had reached operational stage, which is part of why Palantir kept the contract in the first place.

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That gap between ambition and readiness has been the recurring French story on Palantir. Sovereignty was always the stated goal, and the practical absence of a homegrown tool that could match Palantir’s performance kept pushing the deadline back.

The announcement is, in effect, the government deciding the alternative is now good enough to commit to, whether or not the procurement record fully agrees.

The move arrives inside a broader European turn against the company. Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the BfV, recently chose ChapsVision over Palantir for its own data analysis, and the Bundeswehr has been pressing for a secure cloud in which no foreign firm has structural access.

Palantir has, accordingly, been facing German military rejection and investor jitters at the same time. In Britain, the government has been reviewing its £330m NHS contract with the firm. The pattern is European governments reconsidering how much of their most sensitive infrastructure should run on American software.

The reconsideration has a beneficiary class, and France has been building it deliberately. The ChapsVision decision landed the same day Lecornu confirmed that French civil servants would get an AI assistant powered by Mistral, the company the government most often holds up as Europe’s sovereign answer to the American labs.

Mistral’s chief executive, Arthur Mensch, has argued for two years that Europe must own and operate its own AI infrastructure rather than rent it, and the DGSI switch is that argument applied to the most sensitive corner of government.

What has not been disclosed is the timeline for the handover, the value of the ChapsVision contract, or what becomes of the Palantir agreement that was renewed only months ago.

Migrating an intelligence service from one analytical platform to another is not a flip of a switch, and the practical transition is likely to run well beyond the announcement. Palantir did not immediately comment on the French decision.

Prime Day is just around the corner, and while AI has tried its best to spoil our beloved tech gadgets and accessories, Yeedi has a few neat deals in store. The robot maker has already kicked off its early Prime Day deals, offering discounts of up to 67% across some of its most popular models. What’s interesting here is that Yeedi is also offering Prime Protection. In simple terms, if you buy an eligible robot vacuum now and its price drops even further during Prime Day, Yeedi says it’ll refund the difference. So you don’t have to play the usual waiting game and wonder if a better deal is coming next week

Yeedi Prime Day Deals

The standout deal is easily the Yeedi S14 Plus. Normally priced at $1,200, it’s currently available for just $499. For the money, you get a robot vacuum with a powerful 18,000Pa suction system and a built-in mop. In expert reviews, the S14 Plus picks up over 80% of sand from hardwood floors and delivers respectable carpet performance as well, making it a solid all-around option for most homes. If you’re looking for a robot vacuum that can handle everything from pet hair to sticky kitchen messes, this is probably the one we’d recommend.

The Yeedi M14 Plus is getting a healthy discount too. The price drops from $600 to $400. It’s a great vacuum for everyday cleaning, performing on par with the S14 Plus on normal surfaces. However, it falls behind the S14 Plus when carpets enter the equation. That’s why we’d still lean toward the S14 Plus if you want a more versatile cleaning companion. On the other hand, if your home is mostly hardwood, tile, or laminate flooring, the M14 Plus becomes a very compelling option at this price.

Starting June 23, shoppers can grab the Yeedi M16 Infinity for $499.99, down from its usual $799.99 price. The company is also discounting the S20 Infinity to $699.99, which is a substantial drop from its original $1,199.99 price. If you’re looking for something more premium, the S20 Infinity Ultra will be available for $849.99 instead of $999.99. Meanwhile, the S16 Plus drops to $499.99 from $699.99. Yeedi is also teasing a deal on an upcoming product called the C14 Pro Plus. Once it launches, the robot vacuum will be available for $279.99, down from its regular price of $349.99.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle was a bit challenging, but the answers were fun. Some of them are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: For here or to go?

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Time to eat.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• WAND, SAND, HAND, LOAD, SUNG, DRAW, LUNCH, WASH, MUNCH, SPAT, SPATS, PAST, PATS.

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• GYRO, SOUP, WRAP, RAMEN, SANDWICH, SALAD, TACOS

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is WHATSFORLUNCH. To find it, start with the W that’s the first letter on the top row, and wind over and down, kind of forming a numeral 7.

Toughest Strands puzzles

Here are some of the Strands topics I’ve found to be the toughest.

#1: Dated slang. Maybe you didn’t even use this lingo when it was cool. Toughest word: PHAT.

#2: Thar she blows! I guess marine biologists might ace this one. Toughest word: BALEEN or RIGHT. 

#3: Off the hook. Again, it helps to know a lot about sea creatures. Sorry, Charlie. Toughest word: BIGEYE or SKIPJACK.

While Microsoft sweeps the confetti off the floor of its Build event, it may be a good moment to reflect on what it didn’t say as much as what it did. Taking the spotlight was AI agent Scout, ready to “understand how work gets done” and “take action without needing to be prompted.” The software behemoth’s leading database, SQL Server, barely got a mention.

On its own, it may not be a big deal, but Microsoft watchers also noted that long-time SQL Server champion Rohan Kumar left the company in June, while Arun Ulag, president of Azure Data, currently holds the SQL Server remit. He’s also responsible for the Fabric analytics and AI platform and a portfolio of open source database services.

Taken together with the news that Microsoft’s own terms and conditions allow customers to take SQL Server licenses to AWS’s RDS database service without paying twice – thanks to a feature that lets them provide their own SQL Server installation media – the vibe around SQL Server has changed.

“I don’t think it is a priority,” said Andrew Snodgrass, research vice president of analyst company Directions on Microsoft. “With Kumar leaving, that’s become very evident. I think the world of Ulag, but [SQL Server] is not where his focus is for the future. I’m afraid Microsoft are going to leave it languishing.”

He said his concerns for Microsoft’s flagship DBMS began when the 2022 version was released with a “bunch of Azure integration capabilities that no one was really asking for.” It ended up being “more of a marketing release than something that was truly engineered to meet customer needs,” Snodgrass said.

While the introduction of vector search in the 2025 edition was welcomed by users, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Oracle users had been benefiting from the feature for years.

“At Build, Arun Ulag stood up there and talked about all the new stuff: highlights of the database news there was HorizonDB, a PostgreSQL database service with a new form of scale-out capability,” Snodgrass said.

“There was no news about SQL Server, which was stunning, because SQL Server 2025 just came out at the end of last year, and in that they put in AI vector search, which I think is one of the greatest additions to SQL Server I’ve seen in ten years.”

But it seems Microsoft is as interested in its PostgreSQL and other open source database services as it is in its own SQL Server offering. So long as it drives workloads in Azure, it is all good for Microsoft, Snodgrass said.

“It’s the kind of thing Dad might say: it’s not that I’m angry at Microsoft for what they’ve done to SQL Server, I’m just disappointed,” he said.

A Microsoft spokesperson said: “Customers have real choice in how they run SQL Server, and we’ve designed our licensing to be clear and flexible across environments. We’re fully committed to SQL Server and continuing to invest in its innovation, security, and long-term support so customers can confidently run their most critical workloads and build what’s next.”

Microsoft first released SQL Server in 1989 as a 16-bit version for the OS/2 operating system, which was a joint project with IBM. Despite challenges from Oracle, open source systems like PostgreSQL and MySQL, as well as a string of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, it remains highly popular with users and developers. It is third behind Oracle and MySQL – ahead of PostgreSQL – on the DB-Engines ranking, which measures citations, Google data, and job searches. In the Stack Overflow survey of professional developers, it ranks fourth behind PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite, but well ahead of Oracle, which lies in tenth.

Adam Ronthal, vice president analyst at Gartner, said Microsoft’s approach to SQL Server can be explained by looking at two different priorities.

First, despite the hype around the cloud and AI, Microsoft made around $15 billion in revenue from the on-prem DBMS market, largely from SQL Server. It’s second in terms of market share (33 percent) only to Oracle, which holds nearly 40 percent of the on-prem DBMS market.

“If you look at Microsoft’s growth in the on-prem business in 2025, they were growing around 8 percent, so Microsoft continues to have a business in the on-prem that is growing in high single digits,” he said.

There is no way that Microsoft will walk away from that kind of revenue, Ronthal told The Register.

Meanwhile, SQL Server customers represent a good opportunity for Microsoft to convert users to Azure SQL, and the SQL database in Fabric, its data analytics environment, as they are built on a consistent database engine. Microsoft wants people to see that Azure provides a seamless path to build and scale AI applications with deeply integrated data services, security, and governance.

However, Ronthal added that specific compatibility would depend on the implementation of T-SQL in the application users want to move.

“As we go full into managed services, I don’t have full control over the underlying operating system, and I might not have the same level of control over the configuration of the database itself.”

For commercial, off-the-shelf software, the ease of migration would depend on the vendor certification, he said.

As well as wanting to defend its on-prem SQL Server revenue, Microsoft also sees that AI and cloud are driving the market.

In the cloud, the market is dominated by a family of databases based on PostgreSQL or closely related to the open source database.

“The de facto API for relational databases has emerged to be Postgres right now, and so we see many vendors implement wire from compatible Postgres APIs, which provides end users a hedge against lock-in,” Ronthal said.

A string of startups have tried to grab this market, including Cockroach Labs, Yugabyte, and pgEdge, all of which offer distributed capabilities and varying compatibility with PostgreSQL. Microsoft cannot ignore this development, hence its investment in HorizonDB, its own distributed PostgreSQL. Microsoft also has the DBaaS offering, Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

As well as defending the growing on-prem database market, Microsoft is trying to capture the higher growth in cloud databases and catch up with AWS.

As such, it is incorporating operational databases under the Fabric umbrella, including NoSQL database Cosmos, Azure SQL, and Postgres capabilities. “If we look at the drivers of the market right now, which are cloud and AI – Fabric is a core component of AI – then the growth for Microsoft is largely going to be driven by Fabric adoption, where they’re putting a tremendous amount of focus and effort,” Ronthal said.

Nonetheless, Microsoft has deep enough pockets in terms of engineering budget to afford to battle it out on both fronts. In that sense, SQL Server workloads that end up on AWS still make sense.

“Microsoft has some rationalization to do in the portfolio, because there are multiple ways to run SQL Server,” Ronthal said. “You’ve got Azure SQL, managed instances, SQL Server in VMs. These provide slightly different levels of compatibility with what you might be doing in the on-prem world, and right now, the fact that there are multiple options actually makes it difficult for end users to figure out what to do. I would love to see Microsoft make it more unified and easier for people to consume.”

In the cloud DBMS market, AWS has the upper hand by a considerable margin. In 2025, AWS made about $37 billion in cloud DBMS revenue, according to Gartner, while Microsoft made about $18.3 billion.

If a SQL Server customer can leverage an existing investment in Microsoft and bring it to AWS, Microsoft loses that business for Azure, “but on the plus side, they don’t lose a SQL Server customer, and that’s probably more important,” Ronthal said.

Of the leading vendors – Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP – only Microsoft has grown their market share in the last 15 years, Ronthal pointed out. Microsoft has proved capable of riding out changes in the market with both its cloud services and SQL Server strategy. Whether that’s also good for SQL Server customers might be up for debate, but since support for the 2025 version ends in 2036, they have plenty of time to plan. ®