Those direct lines help with customer retention and expansion of services just as well as it provides technical assistance.
Even if AWS has some tech or price superiority, good luck prying those sales teams away from the big orgs and convincing them to go elsewhere - especially after significant ecosystem lock in. Which is another thing Microsoft is better at.
Microsoft simply has the enterprise sales machine completely dominanting and optimized.
It was fascinating watching them role out Azure with the full force of their developer and CTO focused marketing machine which kept hitting me even though I’d never use Microsoft, their ability to penetrate markets was fascinating to watch as an outsider.
This is something Google will never be able to catch up with. And a very important part of these cloud wars which get overlooked while we debate the merits of Microsoft’s engineering yes-to-everything the managers ask approach.
That’s not really what’s important to us, but I should have made that more clear. What is important is the direct line, so that we can call Microsoft and get updates directly from the techs working on the issue when something breaks. Amazon also has genuinely great support, they were even quicker to resolve the GDPR issues that made sure no one outside of the EU will ever access any of our data, not even through logs. But other companies let you talk to automated scripts, and take days to get back to you. So that’s why we like the direct line to Seattle, because it’s better support than most of their competition.