The most vexing secondary effect lockup to Azure comes when you need Microsoft licensing that Microsoft discounts on Azure and offers palliative adjustments to smaller resellers of cloudy systems together with Microsoft licence agreements, which I could almost ignore using up my quota of enterprise licensing cynicism, except for the fact that margin extraction from competing cloudy resellers can't be ohbo for a probable effect on the level of hardware instances purchased for Microsoft customers who I believe are getting depressed specs as a consequence of this squeeze. Which inevitably has a compounding effect on platform renewal schedules and planned performance purchase points that can only push the package customers get downwards.

I have been suspicious that whilst I am not convinced that the impact is so directly causal simply because of the relative small scale of independent clouds selling Microsoft contracts, nevertheless it could easily be this preferential self dealing the motor for slower upgrade cycles at lower budget defined configurations leading to increasing compression of the options available for Microsoft capacity and anecdotally I've found it increasingly difficult to find equivalent instances outside of Azure which if it isn't a anti competitive practice is most certainly a very harsh environment for resellers which has real effect on customer independence and I will surmise that Microsoft probably sees its position in ten years as being a much bigger and more attractive single source by default like Oracle. If being much more attractive than Oracle is attractive to you I would like to hear how. At least for Oracle, now that installs are nearly only hard mission critical F500 budget full metal jacket affairs, I can rationalise the Oracle position because Oracle at size is going to run on Oracle hardware. But the thought that Microsoft is lurching down the same tortuous path only redeemed by the fact that it's almost impossible for competition to follow after you, and taking the whole intensity of x86 competition off the table and with that a huge part of the value proposition Redmond ought to be nurturing far better than this in terms of passing on the difference between economy of scale plus advantage of platform innovation competition and that sum less some reasonable vig, simply is abhorrent not least because having a dominant swing volume customer gain insensitivity to innovation benefits is tremendously bad for the industry ecosystem entirely. This won't have to carry on for long before I will conclude that Microsoft is going to be a ARM vertical within the next ten years.