Taken from <http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229300184&subSection=News>
Microsoft Azure Named Fastest Cloud Service
CloudSleuth's comparison of 13 cloud services showed a tight race among Microsoft, Google App Engine, GoGrid, Amazon EC2, and Rackspace.
In a comparative measure of cloud service providers, Microsoft's Windows Azure has come out ahead. Azure offered the fastest response times to end users for a standard e-commerce application. But the amount of time that separated the top five public cloud vendors was minuscule.
I think the IVS (independent software vendor) space will be very interesting to see what platform is broadly adopted. Will watch with great interest.