Having used both Amazon's Web Services and Azure I am not surprised by this one bit. Once you get past basic hosting and storage Microsoft's offerings are deep

Having used both Amazon's Web Services and Azure I am not surprised by this one bit. Once you get past basic hosting and storage Microsoft's offerings are deeper and better integrated. Also they are bringing out Azure Stack which will let you run Azure on prem. I don't believe this will be ready until 2017 and yes they have specific hardware requirements so you can't just plop it down in an existing data center but I do like the concept and direction.