Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
Any reference for this claim?
Also, if people mostly cared about "the fastest", you'd see only Akamai in the past, but, no, people wanted freedom! I was stuck with Akamai and their $600/hr professional services for too long to know this first-hand! And "the fastest" is when the service is not heavily utilized like the rest and it has very limited functionality. Plus, other vendors constantly improve as well. The fastest service today is not the fastest of the tomorrow, but the one that starts with a minuscule subset of the baseline and what the others is doomed!
I think Microsoft is looking to capture their F500 base that are highly Windows/AD-centric.
Am I missing something?
Note that for YC, the number is $500k.
With Lambda, API Gateway, WAF, and ECS, DynamoDB or RDS, you pretty much can cover 95% of the usage scenarios.