Windows Azure is a Kick-Butt Cloud offering
 
2/10/2012 Don’t look now but Microsoft Azure is a kick-butt cloud http://gigaom.com/cloud/dont-look-now-but-microsoft-azure-is-a-kick-butt-cloud/
  What I liked in the article
 
  GigoOM Article My (Bruno) Response
“It is a full fledged platform as a service” Means the developer doesn't deal with VMs. Just data and applications.
“Google plans a dropbox killer” But MS already has SkyDrive, which is awesome. Skydrive is backed by 6 huge global data centers. You can easily integrate other high end cloud features using Azure storage.
“[Nasuni monitored] ...cloud storage performance, availability and reliability ...” The conclusion - MS has a very robust, powerful cloud offering, compared to the others.
“Microsoft Azure overall has not gotten as much traction as expected as a PaaS, he said, but the infrastructure is so solid and scalable that Microsoft can profit even in the extremely thin margins afforded by plain-old-but-very-important cloud storage.” I agree. People ask me all the time, like at Cloud Connect in Silicon Valley yesterday. How does MS make money when its margins are so razor thin? My answer is simple, our data centers are super automated, with the lowest manual intervention of any cloud provider out there.