My read on this is that this is really "price simplification". If you want to run Windows on the big public clouds, you used to have three options: (1) rent a

My read on this is that this is really "price simplification". If you want to run Windows on the big public clouds, you used to have three options: (1) rent a VM with a license bundled into the per-minute/per-hour rate (2) bring-your-own-license on "dedicated hardware" (3) pay for software assurance Looks like Microsoft is now phasing out (2), so now basically anyone who isn't large enough to have software assurance has only one price: the all-inclusive per-vm per-hour/minute rate.