Microsoft doesn’t really respect their users because most of the users don’t decide by themselves to use Azure. Someone else make the decision for them. And it’s probably like that for many of their other products.
in the case of Azure, the users are the engineers tasked with implementing the infra
I'm not sure I've ever heard of a shop adopting Azure on pure engineering merit but my anecdata are hardly exhaustive. it tends to be forced for weird business reasons (retailers mistrusting Amazon, data residency requirements, sweetheart credit deal, CIO convinced by Azure rep over golf)
AWS and GCP started by engineers building products for engineers and later post success moved into enterprise sales (which AWS is doing well with, GCP not so much).
Azure came late and decided by decree that they needed a Cloud thing and so various business units came together and offered up a "strategy" for how they could re-brand and re-market what they had into a "unified offering".
And so you get things like Azure blob storage with fixed limits on performance per bucket. There's nothing cloud about it. Not so much leaky abstractions as a bucket of water labelled "cloud".
> AWS and GCP started by engineers building products for engineers and later post success moved into enterprise sales (which AWS is doing well with, GCP not so much).
I think that product managers are AWS' and GCP's unsung heroes. One of the best things about AWS is how in contrast everything is designed to integrate exceptionally well with everything in the AWS ecosystem, and all services are designed to be simple, kept simple, and kept backwards compatible even when subjected to major upgrades. Which are always seamless.
In contrast, can anyone explain why Azure has Table Storage but also Cosmos DB, and Cosmos DB is actually half a dozen storage services? Why isn't Table Storage also Cosmos DB, then? Table Storage shares SDKs with CosmosDB, too.
The same applies to messaging. You have Storage Queues, Service Bus queues, Event Hub, and Event Grid. Even when you ask Azure experts what's the difference between, say, Storage Queues and Service Bus Queues, the answer is never clear, simple, straight-forward, or understandable.
It's a mess, and those who have to deal with it are left to navigate this mess.