That I my speculation as well.. when the company I work for migrated from rented hosting to cloud for easier growth, they went Azure because the existing software is all in .Net on windows... Even though new software is targetting Linux, we're staying on Azure mainly for entropy.

It's a valid strategy for keeping their corporate customers.. they have that developer mindshare, and can reduce the systems employees (SysAdmins, DBAs, etc) to boot... Too many corporate environments have dev and admin groups that are combative to eachother... "The Cloud" offers advantages in many of those environments.

I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I can see the appeal on several levels. Though working with some of the azure tools via node, it's not as bright as MS makes it out to be.