Azure is a 'best effort' attempt at a seriously important strategic vertical by a very smart company with deep pockets.
MS would throw zillions of dollars and blood at Azure to make it work.
MS has very deep enterprise relationships, way more so than Amazon or Google and in the long run, that may be the advantage.
A lot of 'fancy services' that we see are not 'the thing' that corps want: they want to spin up servers, basic networking and security, do things at scale. That's the bread and butter and Azure can surely provide that.
Being on the buying side of some of these things, even 100% aware that 'other offers may be better' it's extremely hard to fend off the professionalism of a well managed sales effort. It's even rational: entities that are so operationally effective at managing the relationship 'surely must have tech that works'. And it's a 'safe choice'.
I always assumed Azure would carve something out, IBM, not so much. Oracle, somewhere in between.
I was just pointing out how easily we can misjudge things based on our echo chambers.
> MS has very deep enterprise relationships, way more so than Amazon or Google and in the long run, that may be the advantage.
I think this is something even their competitors realize. That's why the current and previous heads of Google Cloud were from enterprise software companies, Oracle and VmWare.
MS will do very well with Azure, but note that their cloud revenue is also Office 365 revenue (which I suspect is a lot higher).
Though, I haven't personally needed a compelling feature which AWS or GCP was missing, so I have never had to use any other product for work.