Just licensing alone for office is enough to drive a high adoption... $10/month/user is easier to account for in a billing cycle than $200-300/computer every two years.. the cost is more consistent for businesses, and the revenue is more consistent for MS...
Likewise on Azure... Azure based ActiveDirectory, SQL as a service, and simpler deployments (compared to AWS) are a win... I've used Azure at a few positions, and am currently feeling like I'm pulling my hair out with AWS by comparison, just getting some simple deployment strategies. It feels like Azure strikes the "just right" experience better than aws. At least from my limited knowledge and experience.
Wait til you try GCE/GCP. It's so clean, smooth, fast, and cheap. The products so easy to work with.
Azure is great targeting for MS's Enterprise customers but I've had nothing but problems. Terrible perf, weird products, and that horrible UI that just causes pain. I know at least 2 companies that have significant Azure credits but instead pay for GCP because Azure was just so painful.
GCE/GCP is really interesting, though I haven't had the opportunity to use it.
I've said it a few times, but I'd LOVE to see a latency graph/map of the major cloud providers and latency/throughput to eachother's different data centers. This way when you have some services/data in one, and want to do something in another, you have an idea of what the cost in terms of time will be.
ex: Compute/service/docker nodes in DO/Linode via Docker Cloud to manage the clusters, and use data services from azure/aws/gce. I mean, yes it's better to do in the same house/cloud, but for a hobby project where you'd like some redundancy 3x$20 nodes in DO + Azure SQL/Tables or AWS RDS/Aurora. So you don't have to manage your databases, but can save on the service nodes over EC2 or Azure VMs.
God damn Azure performance is SO bad sometimes. I don't think they have the level of monitoring needed to clean up "bad neighbors" on shared servers. I've seen 2x performance increases by simply deleting a virtual machine and recreating it so it gets placed on a different box.
But I probably won't try it because GCE/GCP is a distraction for Google rather than a core business, and I don't wanna do the migration again in two years when they drop it.
This isn't marketing, it's trust. Trust that Google has repeatedly spunked up the wall with other products. It will take them years to unfuck that with companies that don't need the latest and shiniest.
Likewise on Azure... Azure based ActiveDirectory, SQL as a service, and simpler deployments (compared to AWS) are a win... I've used Azure at a few positions, and am currently feeling like I'm pulling my hair out with AWS by comparison, just getting some simple deployment strategies. It feels like Azure strikes the "just right" experience better than aws. At least from my limited knowledge and experience.