How about discussing the proposition on its merits, rather than pedigree?
It's not like there are ten new cloud platform come in every day and we have to make a snap decision. We can, in fact, afford to look at the offer itself.
Sorry, but if I want to buy a laptop, I wouldn't buy one from Pepsi. Similarly, if I want something Internet related, I wouldn't get it from Microsoft. I just don't see any evidence they understand it. They have done an absolutely awful job in the last 10+ years.
If I want to buy something development and execution architecture based, I'm happy to buy that from MSFT since they've done exceedingly well there. How many sites out there have been running on google and amzn's dev/exec arch's the past 10 years? A lot less than Microsoft's. As far as them getting the internet or not, who cares. There's more to life than the internet. Java and .NET run the enterprise, not sure who among MSFT, IBM and Sun really "gets the internet" in the sense you're probably working to define.
It's not like there are ten new cloud platform come in every day and we have to make a snap decision. We can, in fact, afford to look at the offer itself.