I used to think the same about Azure. Most of the experience I have heard about it is not positive, yet it is comfortably number 2. I think the overall pie is huge enough. So you can have advantages in niches in product or good customer relationships and still do well.
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.
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 am not dismissing Azure. Outside of AWS or GCP, the only IaaS platform I can think of using is Azure. MS certainly has the competency to run a good competitor alongside AWS and GCP in the long run.
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.
It doesn't really matter, tbh. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and Google have a terrible partnership culture. FB are a little better, and I assume Amazon must be OK, but MS have a sales force that can actually sell, supported by an organisation that commits to products for the long term.
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.