This is the same old strategy of giving students discounts which get them accustomed to proprietary products, then marketing to those same students when they graduate.
Now it's just adapted for remotely-hosted software.
Now it's just adapted for remotely-hosted software.
Sure. But how is Azure and Microsoft cloud services any more proprietary than AWS or Google's offerings?
The 1 billion number sounds impressive on its own - wonder how many credits Amazon has given away by now?
Lets hope MS reaches out to github or vice-versa so they can get added to the student pack:
edit: http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture
It's hard to separate out the Microsoft stack and the scale up approach because for licensing reasons they tend to go together. If you find yourself in the position of transitioning from scale up to scale out by adding dozens of cores, MS licensing will bite you.