Unfortunately, Enterprise deals are more based on sales skills than technology. Companies like Microsoft tend to have multiple ongoing points of contact with their Enterprise customers such as account managers, technical account managers, professional services consultants etc. These points of contact are (hopefully) doing whatever it is the customer wants them to but are also feeding back intel to their (Microsoft's) sales team(s) all sorts of details about what they see and hear from the customer. Microsoft has had a couple of decades (or more) to burrow deep inside customer organizations that Amazon hasn't.

Back in the late 90's Bill Gates was known to personally pitch for really big contracts.

He did this for British Telecom when we where deciding which word processor to use AMI Pro vs MS Word

What is wrong with all that? That they implement what the customer wants?

I don't really get this feeling, they implement what some corporate monkey a couple of levels removed from anybody that ever works with Azure wants in out case.

Nothing... I was just making the point that Microsoft has a number of people on the inside at Enterprise customers (which Amazon typically won't have) who help their sales team. This, rather than technical or service offering differences, is likely a significant factor as to why they appear to be more successful at winning contracts against Amazon.

The 'unfortunately' part of my comment was only referring to the fact that technical differences often don't play a significant factor in these deals.

Think MS just has a better sales experience for cloud in general after getting to know the space - not just existing contacts.

People like to ding AWS for lock-in, but Microsoft still does it better.

Lock-in is basically a footnote at this point. No one is planning to buy major cloud resources and also planning an exit plan. It was more relevant 5-10 years ago when things were less certain

I don't think people worry about about lock in for either when deciding cloud providers, considering cloud agnostic solutions exist when it is a concern.