... by becoming OSS friendly, and especially Linux friendly. Prior to that Microsoft and Azure were irrelevant because nobody wanted to run their backends on Windows.
Azure always had a very large and devoted following of corps who were all in on Windows, even in the early days when everything Azure ran on Windows. They had a very deep fanbase which caused them to not see things from the Silicon Valley perspective
Yes, the same nerds who would balk at using Windows would have balked at using Azure, but when it was time to choose clouds, that foot that Microsoft had in the door with corporate paid off big time. Many people have the privilege of working detached from the corporate world, but that also leads to warped perceptions like that of Paul in 2007.
Yep, I do think Paul was presciently observing a powerful class of people who would end up making the decisions in big companies that would not end up being all in MS customers, but I also remember being shocked seeing the demand for Azure when it first released (we wrote add-on software for cloud deployments for the big 3 clouds, and some smaller ones)