> Cloud compute is a commodity, even one of the major things sold by internet Wal-Mart. Is that really where Microsoft wants to go? If you think the direction

> Cloud compute is a commodity, even one of the major things sold by internet Wal-Mart. Is that really where Microsoft wants to go? If you think the direction of cloud computing is heading towards commodification, then it's very clear you don't understand Microsoft's strategy or Amazon's strategy. Selling VMs and containers are commodity services that every large cloud provider must sell so they don't disqualify themselves, but the margins suck and the lock-in is minimal. Look at the AWS and Azure catalog. There's a tremendous amount of value added services that go beyond selling commodity systems and they are selling. They're selling for one simple reason: Most people don't want to build their own cloud scalable architectures, they want to solve their problems. If AWS and Azure can make it easy for an intern to set up auto-scaling databases and Kafka messaging system, then their manager is more likely to will be willing to pay a premium of the company's money so they can meet their deadlines.