While I don't completely disagree, I think with the relative success of Azure, and with the opening up on .Net itself (just announced) that MS is clearly hedging some bets on being a tools/application stack provider as well as it's services.

I actually really like Office 365 and their hosted mail offerings, though I think Outlook has become a bit more annoying with the changes for scalability that MS needed to make. The world is moving away from windows as a platform, so it makes sense to double-down where they have a lot of hold...

Developing end to end solutions with VS is usually more pleasant than competing options, and windows licensing has been their bottleneck. With the push to cloud hosting, MS is in a better position than most to leverage their tooling... Though I really hated the early marketing of Azure within the .Net community, for a while it seemed like every MS tech presentation was an advertisement for Azure. (which kind of pushed men out)...

That said, actually using Azure is pretty nice, and imho quite a bit easier, even for Linux than using AWS and others. I'm not developing new solutions with MS's windows+.net in mind. But opening up .Net more may change my stance there.