[timsneath]

This an insightful post -- but I think there's one key characteristic missing that Wall Street cares about still more, and that's growth.

Traditional products like Office 365 may be sold as a subscription, but the market is largely saturated. Its growth is primarily dependent on productivity device growth. "True" cloud products, whether serverless or lift and shift of existing workloads, have much higher growth potential since a large percentage of the attachable market is still unreached.

That's why it's a little disingenuous for Microsoft to claim products like Office 365 and Dynamics 365 as cloud revenue. For many years before the cloud was a thing, they earned that revenue in the form of Enterprise Agreements: which are essentially three-year subscriptions for the same products.