[apohn]

At my last job (left about a year ago) I worked for a large Enterprise software company that was moving to a PaaS/SaaS model from historically being an on-prem vendor.

A lot of customers would hear "We are on AWS" and immediately follow up with "Are you planning on Azure? We have standardized on Azure." So many customers asked about running one of the PaaS products on Azure that the company was basically forced to build an Azure version. These were all well known Fortune companies in the Fortune 100/500, not some failing big-corp.

That being said, the customers were all large non software companies (e.g. Volkswagen). We definitely didn't sell to startups outside of some marketing BS.

I don't think Azure is a dead-end. But from a pure job flexibility standpoint, AWS obviously gives you the largest set of employers to choose from if you want to work for a startup or software company.