There are many interesting parts of this interview with a Former Director of GCP who worked with Thomas Kurian at Google and Oracle and who was also at Microsoft during the launch of Azure.
Microsoft pretty much gave away Azure in the early days:
Everybody has at least Windows and/or Microsoft Office and Teams now, and Satya leveraged the heck out of that. They said, if you're a Microsoft customer, it's easy to add Azure. During the early days we would add Azure credits and people would ask what the hell is this $20,000 worth of Azure? We would say, don't worry about it; we just took $20,000 off your SQL Server licensing and gave you $20,000 monthly credit. That's how we planted that seed, and now they're using it and consuming it. - Former VP at Google Cloud
Microsoft had the enterprise customer base, FCF generation, and a great leader in Satya to plant the seeds of Azure.
Compare this to Oracle…
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