[curiousDog]

Just curious, do you work for Microsoft? Last I heard, Azure was doing pretty well, considering Office 365, TFS and a host of other internal services are hosted on it. They seem to be the most formidable competition to AWS right now (and I believe that, I tried all GCE, AWS and Azure over the weekend and while AWS was the best, Azure was a close second while GCE was just slow and buggy).

[latch]

No, I don't. Also, my view of Azure pretty much comes from experience with it long ago and a year-old Gartner analysis [1]. I can easily accept that Azure is very different than it used to be. I can also easily accept that it's doing better against AWS than anyone else.

But I'd need hard numbers to refute that Gartner analysis. Spending 50% more than your competitor and having a market share less than 1/5 (probably a lot more, since the 1/5 is 15 providers combined), is something I struggle to call "success". I'd be less harsh if this didn't fit a pattern. And I know spending more and having less is the price that challengers face, but again, not being an incumbent (and failing to mount a real challenge) is a pattern we've seen before.

[1] http://readwrite.com/2013/08/21/gartner-aws-now-5-times-the-...

[curiousDog]

Ah, I believe this is what I came across and is more recent: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/05/heres-why-m...

[jsolson]

I'd be curious to know what issues you ran into with GCE. I work on the team, and external reports of performance or stability issues are helpful.