The MS servers are less weird than the Facebook servers, so they may appeal to people who are just starting to get into Open Compute.

Define "less weird"

They use standard racks and standard power.

Reduction in energy cost as well as hardware costs.

Saving say 1 watt per hour power blade, scaled across a thousand servers (with 100% up time) is something like 8.76 Gigawatt-Hours of power per year (not counting cooling). At average California power rates (15.2 cents per kilowatt-hour), your saving 1.3 million dollars per year in power costs.

Did you consider a server having 1000 blades? Because otherwise 1 * 24 * 365 * 1000 = 8760000Wh, meaning 8.7MWh, not GWh, and the savings are $1300.

Unless they developed some significantly different hardware with significantly different capabilities, I'd say they don't add much.

What Microsoft may achieve is to build machines that are better suited to run Windows, as most other large scale operations don't deploy Windows servers to production. Microsoft, being the only company that has 1M Windows servers is uniquely positioned to develop it.